Re: REST and HTTP Update

On Tuesday 6. October 2009 22:26:08 Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
> This is the problem and the point where the question of what is RESTful
> drifts from best practice to philosophy IMHO.  .

Yes, you could say that. Moreover, REST has limitations, there is no doubt 
about that. We should make it clear when we are following it and when we 
are not and make sure we understand it.

However, my main point is that we shouldn't have this discussion at all 
right now, this should have been done on a time-permitting basis only. 
There are so many good things that we have ruled out (I still mourn the 
loss of the fulltext index ;-) ), and this is such a marginal improvement 
over "pure REST + the Update Language", it shouldn't be a topic at all at 
this point.

That is not to say that it isn't useful, it is (our current solution at 
work can't even do pure REST), and I can see that it is unfriendly to parse 
RDF/XML and serialize to Turtle to use the Language. But still, I think it 
should be on a time-permitting basis only, because we can spend huge 
amounts of time and delay the specs by arguing over this, even without 
being very much in disagreement (I don't think we are). 

So, how about a tiny little paragraph about this, and leave it at that, 
with a note to the effect that it is an "at risk" feature? 

> Consider the 'opacity axiom' [1] which (I believe) is often associated
> with claims that URIs which require an intermediate agent to parse their
> lexical form violates a best practice:

Yup, but there is no intermediate agent in Steve's proposal, is there?

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
kjetil@kjernsmo.net
http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/

Received on Wednesday, 7 October 2009 18:40:23 UTC