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

Hi all,

On Mar 27, 2012, at 18:01, Jeni Tennison wrote:

> Jonathan,
> 
> On 27 Mar 2012, at 14:02, Jonathan A Rees wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 7:52 AM, Michael Brunnbauer <brunni@netestate.de> wrote:
>> This whole "information resource" thing needs to just go away. I can't
>> believe how many people come back to it after the mistake has been
>> pointed out so many times. Maybe the TAG or someone has to make a
>> statement admitting that the way httpRange-14(a) was phrased was a big
>> screwup, that the real issue is content vs. description, not a type
>> distinction.
> 
> Yes, that may help. But then we would also have to define what 'content' and 'description' meant. I have a feeling that might prove just as slippery and ultimately unhelpful as 'information resource'.


I fought against jettisoning the IR/NIR distinction for years, but finally realized that I was wrong to do so.  The thing that convinced me was the simple fact that we can describe an IR (e.g. an HTML page) with another IR (an RDF document) without needing to say that either one was or was not an IR (other than optionally in the RDF).

By contrast, we do have Content-Type to talk about the content of a Representation and Jeni's four ways below (two ways of using a link tag with rel="describedby", Link: header with a 'describedby', or 303) to talk about descriptions.

I'd be happy to forget about IR/NIR, limit the meaning of "content" to the Content-Type and limit the scope of a "description" to one of those four approaches.

Any takers?

Regards,
Dave


> 
>> I think Jeni's proposal is to say that the Flickr URI is good
>> practice, rather than deny it. My proposal is to say that the
>> description-free situation is good practice, rather than just an
>> undocumented common practice.
> 
> Let's call it 'The Explicit Description Link Change Proposal'; it isn't "mine" except in so far as I coordinated its drafting and submitted it.
> 
> Anyway, it doesn't say that the Flickr URI is good practice, it just says that clients can't make any assumptions one way or the other about whether the retrieved representation is content or description unless it contains explicit statements or the description is reached through a description link (303 redirect; 'describedby' Link: header).
> 
> Good practice would be for Flickr to use separate URIs for 'the photograph' and 'the description of the photograph', to ensure that 'the description of the photograph' was reachable from 'the photograph' and to ensure that any statements referred to the correct one. Under the proposal, they could change to this good practice in four ways:
> 
> 1. by adding:
> 
>  <link rel="describedby" href="#main" />
> 
> to their page (or pointing to some other URL that they choose to use for 'the description of the photograph')
> 
> 2. by adding a Link: header with a 'describedby' relationship that points at a separate URI for 'the description of the photograph' (possibly a fragment as in 1?)
> 
> 3. by switching to using http://www.flickr.com/photos/70365734@N00/6905069277/#photo or something everywhere the photograph was referred to, adding:
> 
>  <link about="#photo" rel="describedby" href="" />
> 
> in their page and adding about="#photo" on the body element in the HTML so that the RDFa statements in the page were about the photograph
> 
> 4. by introducing support for a new page http://www.flickr.com/photos/70365734@N00/6905069277/description and adding a 303 redirection from http://www.flickr.com/photos/70365734@N00/6905069277/ to that URL
> 
> The first two methods are only feasible under the proposal; the others are things they could do now.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jeni
> -- 
> Jeni Tennison
> http://www.jenitennison.com
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 23:55:47 UTC