Re: Discovering service descriptions

On 11 Aug 2009, at 07:08, Gregory Williams wrote:

> On Aug 11, 2009, at 2:01 AM, Steve Harris wrote:
>
>> On 11 Aug 2009, at 06:03, Gregory Williams wrote:
>>
>>> I'm still worried about HTTP OPTIONS not having a lot of support  
>>> in some client libraries. It also (I believe) make it difficult to  
>>> get at a service description with a web browser for visual  
>>> inspection. Do any browsers provide a way to make OPTIONS requests  
>>> (I know curl allows this)?
>>
>> Certainly Firefox and Safari do. I don't have any others to test  
>> on, but a quick google suggests that IE and Chrome support it too.  
>> See http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/
>
> Hmmm... I was hoping for something that didn't involve javascript  
> (hence "visual inspection"). I'd like to be able to glance over  
> what's in a service description without having to resort to  
> programming. I suppose the conneg option might help here, but in  
> general I suspect conneg for html would return just a query form,  
> not an html-formatted version of the service description.

Agreed that's not ideal. I don't /think/ you can conneg to another  
verb though.

If it's purely for human consumption there could be a recommendation  
in the spec the what is at the top level of the endpoint includes a  
link to a human readable description. Seems like a bit of a heavy  
requirement though.

- Steve

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Steve Harris
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Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 06:16:44 UTC