Re: Is 303 really necessary?

Ian,

(trying to keep up with this thread, maybe missed one point or the other)

I'd like to understand on what we can agree here. It seems that having a URI
for a thing and another URI for the document describing it is something most
people would acknowledge to be useful.

Two questions that come immediately into mind: Who cares? What are the costs
and what are the benefits?

First, I'd reckon that a certain number of tools and library developers
(incl. Tabulator, RAP, RDB2RDF mapping tools, etc.) will have to care about
this in the first place. Given the relative small size of the community
compared to the Web at large this seems doable.

Second, as already pointed out, the 303 issue mainly effects setups where
the RDF representation is detached from the HTML (such as RDF/XML, Turtle,
etc.), which means that the emerging and increasing part of the RDFa-based
Linked Data world is not effected per se.

Third, given that we're still a small community and find certain things to
be sub-optimal, the cost changing it now is likely less than changing it in,
say, 5 years time.

I think I can hence sympathise with your proposal to (carefully) revisit the
issue and think about alternatives. Now, having said this, although I think
one should contemplate about the 303 issue, I don't agree with your proposed
plan ahead; certain items on your list are rather simple to achieve (define
the :isDescribedBy, update the LD guide, etc.) others not.

It occurs to me that one of the main features of the Linked Data community
is that we *do* things rather than having endless conversations what would
be the best for the world out there. Heck, this is how the whole thing
started. A couple of people defining a set of good practices and providing
data following these practices and tools for it.

Concluding. If you are serious about this, please go ahead. You have a very
popular and powerful platform at your hand. Implement it there (and in your
libraries, such as Moriarty), document it, and others may/will follow.


Cheers,
      Michael

-- 
Dr. Michael Hausenblas
LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
http://sw-app.org/about.html



> From: Ian Davis <me@iandavis.com>
> Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2010 13:22:09 +0000
> To: Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>
> Subject: Is 303 really necessary?
> Resent-From: Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>
> Resent-Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:22:46 +0000
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
> night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
> redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
> with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
> the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
> 
> http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ian
>

Received on Friday, 5 November 2010 09:30:38 UTC