Re: SPARQL 1.1 Protocol: Format of fault messages

Ian,

On 1 Oct 2010, at 15:22, Ian Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Richard Cyganiak  
> <richard@cyganiak.de> wrote:
>> My proposal would be:
>>
>> 1. To state in the HTTP binding that clients SHOULD use the XML fault
>> message format when reporting faults.
>
> I disagree with this position. A principle I adhere to is that errors
> are debugged by humans not machines

I agree with this principle. But a human cannot debug the error  
message if it isn't passed through all layers of the system up to the  
user.

> so therefore I favour plain text
> error messages.

Plain text is certainly one step forward from an HTML error page  
containing a Java stack trace.

> Underconstraining the spec in this case is a better option.

Underconstraining means that some implementations will continue to use  
HTML error pages, which do not allow reliable reporting of error  
messages to a human if the human uses a SPARQL library or SPARQL  
client to interact with the endpoint.

Hence, the position you advocate makes it less likely that a user will  
actually see an error message.

Richard


>
> Ian

Received on Friday, 1 October 2010 14:54:07 UTC