Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

On 24 Mar 2012, at 13:57, Jonathan A Rees wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 7:17 AM, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
>> Where well-behaved sites will have to make a decision is whether to continue to use a 303 or switch to using a 200 and including a 'describedby' relationship. For example, we at legislation.gov.uk might be seriously tempted to switch to returning 200s from /id/ URIs. Currently, anyone requesting an /id/ places a load on our origin server because the CDN can't cache the 303 response, so we try to avoid using them in links on our site even where we could (and really should). Consequently people referring to legislation don't use the /id/ URIs when what they are referring to is the legislation item, not a particular version of it. If we switched to a 200, we wouldn't have to avoid those URIs, which would in turn help us embed RDFa in our pages, because instead of having a reference in a footnote contain something like: [...]
> 
> Sorry to be a broken record here, I must be really not be hearing what
> everyone is saying, but why don't you just use hash URIs? (Using the
> #it or #_ indirection pattern if necessary.) This is the received
> wisdom from the original semweb design, and they don't have any of the
> problems that 303s or 200s do.

Indeed. You keep getting responses too [1][2][3][4], whenever you ask about this [5], and you have even taken some of them aboard sufficient to write them down here:

  http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/issue57/latest/#misspellings

I doubt that me restating those replies will make them any more persuasive to you.

I'll be honest with you. When we were designing legislation.gov.uk a few years ago, we looked at Cool URIs for the Semantic Web [6]. It said that we could use hash-less URIs. We weren't doing "quick and easy publication of RDF files". Hash-less URIs looked cleaner and neater and more consistent with the URIs that we needed elsewhere, so we made a design decision that that was what we were going to use.

At this point, it would be very difficult for us to rework everything to use hash URIs instead. I imagine there are a number of organisations who are in this position.

I guess it would be possible to make a Change Proposal that removed the possibility of non-hash URIs working altogether. Has someone proposed that? If not, I don't see the relevance of rehashing (ho ho) why one might choose hash or slash URIs.

As far as I'm concerned, the core problem is that there are currently, on the web at large, people publishing data in which they make statements like:

  <http://www.businesswire.com> a schema:Organization;
     schema:name "BUSINESS WIRE";
     schema:url <http://www.businesswire.com> .

I think we need a change which both helps those who have been doing the Right Thing with 303s, and relieves us (the Semantic Web community) from being in the position of constantly telling people who just want to publish some semantic data on the web that they are Doing It Wrong.

Cheers,

Jeni

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2011Aug/0127.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2011Aug/0115.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2011Sep/0023.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2011Sep/0024.html
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2011Aug/0112.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Saturday, 24 March 2012 18:59:23 UTC