Re: 200 OK with Content-Location might work

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 7:35 PM, Phil Archer <phila@w3.org> wrote:
> I share John's unease here. And I remain uneasy about the 200 C-L solution.
>
> I know I sound like a fundamentalist in a discussion where we're trying to
> find a practical, workable solution, but is a description of a toucan a
> representation of a toucan? IMO, it's not. Sure, one can imagine an HTTP
> response returning a very rich data stream that conveys the entire
> experience of having a toucan on your desk - but the toucan ain't actually
> there.

The content-location header says that the entity being sent in the
response is not a representation of the resource.

I don't want to get into a heavy "what is a representation really"
debate because those have been done to minute detail over on the TAG
list for many years. Suffice to say that http://www.google.com/ has a
representation that is not the entire experience of the google website
get that URI denotes the google website for the majoriity of people.

> I've been toying with the idea of including a substitution rule in a 200
> header.

I'd prefer not to invent anything new, e.g. new headers or status
codes. I'm just looking to simplify an existing set of patterns.

> My worry is that any 200-based solution is going to be poorly implemented in
> the real world by both browsers and LOD publishers (Talis excepted of
> course!) so that IRs and NIRs will be indistinguishable 'in the wild'.

My proposal keeps the two separate with distinct URIs. With clear
guides, education and testing tools we can encourage people to do the
right thing, just like we currently do with any standard.

However, philosophically I wonder whether there are any practical
consequences of them being indistinguishable. When i read my email in
gmail it is hard to separate the email from the webpage allowing me to
read the email yet it still works.

>
> 303 works already, and that is still the one that feels right to me. I'm
> happy that the discussion here is centred on adding a new method cf.
> replacing 303, especially as the HTTP-Bis group seems to have made its use
> for LOD and explicit part of the definition.

It would still be available. My proposal is to provide a streamlined
alternative, one that is more in line with what millions of webmasters
are doing already.


Ian

Received on Sunday, 7 November 2010 21:12:29 UTC