Thought: 207 Description Follows

Hi all!

I hope it is OK that I just burst in here without having followed the 
discussion. Admittedly, I haven't been terribly interested, I've always 
enjoyed the 303 dance, I wrote the code and it was easy, and the IR/NIR 
distinction has always served me well. However, I also see that it is a bit 
painful to have to do follow a redirect, both for end users and for code, and 
the bit about cachability, CORS problems, etc makes it clear there is room for 
improvement.

So, how about a new HTTP response code, e.g. 207 Description Follows? I.e., it 
is like 200 OK, but makes it clear that what you're dereferencing is not an 
IR. Instead, you're getting a description of the thing.

This would have implications well beyond our community, GETting the URI of a 
device in the Internet of Things would  also reasonably return a 207. Without 
having thought too deeply about this, I suggest this means it satisfies the 
orthogonality of specifications constraint.

I just quickly hacked a server to test how browsers would react to a 207 code, 
and all browser I have did it gracefully. I therefore conjecture that clients 
needing to know the IR/NIR distinction will be able to figure it out by looking 
at the status code only, those that need not, would not need to be bothered. 
 
Deployment costs should thus be very low. We're also working to get our code 
into Debian (older versions are already in Ubuntu), so if we have this settled 
before Debian Wheezy freezes in June, it would be available in mainstream 
hosting solutions late this year. I think that's a key, because many users 
control very little of their server setup, and custom code is "dangerous", but 
with the support of Debian the costs for hosters are marginal. 

Naively Yours,

Kjetil

Received on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 08:47:15 UTC