[HTTP-in-RDF] Entity class?

Hi there,

in 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-earl10-comments/2009Dec/0004.html> 
Jonathan Rees suggested to add an Entity class to the HTTP-in-RDF 
vocabulary. Only entity headers would be associated with resources of 
type Entity.

I guess, the other headers would still be associated to a Message resource.

He also writes that this "would be useful in validating cache and proxy
correctness, for example in accounting for the 'etag' header."

I do not see that this is not possible with the current approach.

Basically I see one major problem: HTTP-in-RDF represents the 
_structure_ of HTTP things, not the _semantics_. HTTP-in-RDF is 
header-purpose-agnostic. If we follow Jonathan's approach we have to 
distinguish entity headers from non-entity headers.

HTTP 1.1 lists "general-header (section 4.5), request-header (section 
5.3), response-header (section 6.2), and entity-header (section 7.1) 
fields". However, the IANA registry for message header field names does 
not give any indication about this classification (because it is a 
registry for message header field names, not _HTTP_ message header field 
names?). Even in RFC 4229 "HTTP Header Field Registrations" there's no 
indication.

We could assume that the entity header field names listed in HTTP 1.1 
section 7.1 are the only field names to be classified as entity header 
field names, meaning every field name to be registered with IANA apart 
from these cannot be an entity header field. But I don't know if this is 
a viable assumption.

-- 
Johannes Koch
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT
Web Compliance Center
Schloss Birlinghoven, D-53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Phone: +49-2241-142628    Fax: +49-2241-142065

Received on Wednesday, 3 March 2010 08:52:59 UTC