Re: Is 303 really necessary?

On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 21:50 +0000, Dave Reynolds wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 15:34 -0500, David Booth wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 10:11 +0000, Toby Inkster wrote:
> > > On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 13:22:09 +0000
> > > Ian Davis <me@iandavis.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
> > > 
> > > Ian brings up numerous difficulties with 303 responses.
> > > 
> > > The two biggest issues in my opinion are:
> > > 
> > >  1. 303s can be tricky to configure unless you know your
> > >     way around the server environment you're using, and
> > >     have sufficient permissions on the server; and
> > > 
> > >  2. They require an additional HTTP request to get to the
> > >     data the client actually wants.
> > > 
> > > I think that without using RDF-specific publishing platforms (think
> > > WordPress for Linked Data) #1 is always going to be a difficulty.
> > 
> > Why not use a 303-redirect service such as
> > http://thing-described-by.org/ or http://t-d-b.org/ ?  That makes it
> > trivially easy to do 303 redirects.  
> 
> Because the domain of the URI conveys some provenance and trust
> connotations, particularly when dealing with public sector bodies. That
> gets lost when redirected through a third party service. For many of the
> groups I deal with that would not be acceptable.

But you don't have to use a third-party redirect service.  You can run
your own if you want.  The files for implementing thing-described-by.org
are available here:
http://thing-described-by.org/?showfile=. 

> 
> In cases where third party redirection is acceptable then there are also
> PURLs which arguably provide stronger expectations of longevity.

+1 for PURLs.  

And BTW, I have used PURLs in conjunction with thing-described-by.org.
Although purl.org can do 303 redirects for individual URIs, it cannot
currently do 303's *and* partial redirects.  To get around this
limitation, I used purl.org to do a partial redirect to a
thing-described-by.org URI, which then does the 303 redirect to its
query string URI:

  http://purl.org/example/foo/*  -- 302 --> 
     http://thing-described-by.org/?http://example/foo/*  -- 303 -->
       http://example/foo/*
 



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 23:35:01 UTC