Re: URL +1, LSID -1

On 7/10/07, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > URIs are cheap, we suggest creating as many distinctive URIs as is
> > meaningful.

You want one and only one URI for each thing you might want to name.
It sounds like this is true - there is a URI for the record, one for
the RDF form, one for the HTML, etc.

I sort of regret the commons/type/source/id structure I chose for our
PURLs; doing commons/source/type/id would have been better, I think,
and commons/source/id.type is not terrible.

> > Are there any standards/tools that know what to do with 303 responses?
>
> Some. An influential tool by a certain Tim Berners Lee called
> Tabulator does. I've understood that it is considered a courtesy to
> respond 303 to things which are not gettable as such, and to provide
> information about related information, in this case the specifically
> formatted versions.

The main reason to give a redirect (such as a 303) is to prevent
confusion between the resource and its metadata-carrying information
resource. If you return a 200, you only ever see one URI, and it would
be easy to think that it denoted the document you saw when you did the
GET - that something you said about the page you got might be true of
the resource denoted by the URI you dereferenced.  By doing a
redirect, a new URI is named, and if e.g. you look in your browser URL
box you'll see the new URI, which presumably names the
metadata-carrying page.

I don't know of any serious use of 303, but I think it is logically
necessary. At least do a 307 or some other redirect so that the 2nd
URI is exposed.

Received on Tuesday, 10 July 2007 20:03:46 UTC