Re: Is 303 really necessary?

Hi David,

Rather than respond to each of your points let me say that I agree
with most of them :) I have snipped away the things I agree with in
principle, and left the things I want to discuss further.

I have a question about  http://thing-described-by.org/ - how does it
work when my description document describes multiple things? Really,
any RDF document that references more than one resource as a subject
or object can be considered to be providing a description of all those
resources.

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:10 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
>>  2. only one description can be linked from the
>>toucan's URI
>
> True, but that's far better than zero, if you only
> have the toucan URI and it returns 404!
>
It could return 204.



>>  3. the user enters one URI into their browser and ends
>>up at a different one, causing confusion when they want to
>>reuse the URI of the toucan. Often they use the document
>>URI by mistake.
>
> Yes, that's a problem.  The trade-off is ambiguity.

I don't think so. The ambiguity is not present because the data
explicitly distinguishes the two URIs (and content-location header
does too).


>>  7. it mixes layers of responsibility - there is
>>information a user cannot know without making a network
>>request and inspecting the metadata about the response
>>to that request. When the web server ceases to exist then
>>that information is lost.
>
> I don't buy this argument.  While I agree that
> explicit statements such as
>
>  <Utoucan> :isDescribedBy <Upage> .
>
> is helpful and should be provided, that does *not*
> mean that links are not *also* useful.  Just because
> links do not *always* work does not mean that they
> are useless.

But you agree that under the current scheme, some things are knowable
only by making a network request. It's not enough to have just the RDF
description document?

Cheers,

Ian

Received on Friday, 5 November 2010 11:00:04 UTC