deployment issues with fragment/range protocol

During lunch here, Kendall just prompted me to elaborate on
the "architectural issue" I saw with the XPointer/Range
protocol design. I turns out to be not an architecture problem,
really, so much as a deployment issue.

Taking an example from
http://wiki.cognitiveweb.org/HttpRangeAndXPointer
of 2004-04-12 15:23:38

      GET /foo HTTP/1.1 
      Host: rest.myorg.org 
      Accept: application/xml+rss 
      Range: xpointer=xmlns(ns:=http://myorg.org/xpointer/scheme/xpath)ns:xpath(//item/3) 

As a URI, that looks like:
 http://rest.myorg.org/#xpointer=xmlns(ns:=http://myorg.org/xpointer/scheme/xpath)ns:xpath(//item/3) 

which is all well and good if the client knows to use this range
protocol, but if I hand that URI to, say, wget, it'll
do the traditional thing of urlopen("http://rest.myorg.org/")
and then apply the #xpointer... to the result, never sending
the query to the server at all.

I prefer to use ? (or / or whatever, but not #) to join the
query to the rest of the URI, so that our design would say
the URI in this case is:


http://rest.myorg.org/?xpointer=xmlns(ns:=http://myorg.org/xpointer/scheme/xpath)ns:xpath(//item/3) 
and if I give that to wget, it'll send the query to the server.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 14 July 2004 16:05:10 UTC