Re: ACTION: elaborate on 4.4

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 09:42:30AM -0700, Rob Shearer muttered something about:
> 
> 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.

Well, there seem to be only two places to put the info -- in the protocol or
in the query language. If it goes into the protocol, reusing some of the
mechanisms HTTP already specifies, then the Separatists claim that there's
not enough separation. 

If it goes into the query language, then the Purists claim that we're
failing to reuse the existing, underly bits of web architecture.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Nice.

Best,
Kendall Clark
-- 
You're one in a million
You've got to burn to shine

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 13:32:07 UTC