RE: ACTION: elaborate on 4.4

At 9:42 -0700 6/24/04, Rob Shearer wrote:
>I'm not entirely clear as to the intent of the discussion around the
>HTTP "Accept:" header.
>
>I've gone on record claiming that it makes a lot of sense to try to keep
>the query language and the protocol as independent as possible, and this
>thread seems to be going in just the other direction. It's one thing to
>say that a query language will (logically) generate some results in a
>well-defined format, and then a protocol may transform those results in
>some way (like applying compression), but it's quite another to consider
>some kind of format specifier being passed through the protocol into the
>query language proper. Even if protocol and language are fully separate
>standards, there is nothing which prevents this being done as an
>optimization, but it seems bizarre to be requiring such functionality in
>query processors.


Rob - apologies if this is rehashing old stuff, but I couldn't find 
an obvious thread in the old mail - a pointer to the right messages 
would suffice if you've already wiritten this up...  but

WHY do you believe we should keep this independent and that it is 
bizarre (your word) to do this?  It seems to me that many very 
successful protocols do indeed interact with the things they serve in 
various ways (cf. http and mime types, http design and html) and the 
same is true in many query systems - esp. datalog- and OODB- based 
protocols where it is not uncommon for some sort of information about 
the query form to be part of the protocol (often simply as a 
parameter to the query that can be brought in separate from the query 
form itself).  I'm not an expert on JDBC, but I understood that it 
also had some mechanisms (maybe they're system adds) to do this for 
reporting back the results of SQL queries (sort of the opposite - 
i.e. the protocol was specifically designed for the query language)
  I'm not arguing, I'm just saying it does not seem /a priori/ bizarre 
to me to see a Web-based protocol and a Web-based language assumign 
some sort of interaction with respect to Web formats and language 
issues.
  thanks
  JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 13:00:25 UTC