Re: NIR SIDETRACK Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

This seems an appropriate place for me to drop in my 2 cents.

I like the 303 trick. People that care about this stuff can use it
(and appear to be doing so), but it doesn't really matter too much
that people that don't care don't use it. It seems analogous to the
question of HTML validity. Best practices suggest creating valid
markup, but if it isn't perfect, it's not a big deal, most UAs will be
able to make sense of it. There will be reduced fidelity of
communication, sure, but there will be imperfections in the system
whatever, so any trust/provenance chain will have to consider such
issues anyway.
So I don't really think Jeni's proposal is necessary, but don't feel
particularly strongly one way or the other.

Philosophically I reckon the flexibility of what a representation of a
resource can be means that the notion of an IR isn't really needed.
I've said this before in another thread somewhere, but if the network
supported the media type "thing/dog" then it would be possible to GET
http://example.org/Basil with full fidelity. Right now it doesn't, but
I'd argue that what you could get with media type "image/png" would
still be a valid, if seriously incomplete representation of my dog. In
other words, a description of a thing shares characteristics with the
thing itself, and that's near enough for HTTP representation purposes.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://dannyayers.com

http://webbeep.it  - text to tones and back again

Received on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 11:59:58 UTC