Re: opaque uris and self-describing resources

hello cilve.

Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Sandro Hawke said:
>>> so i assume to discover the non-http nature of the resource 
>>> identified by u1, there must be some content within the returned 
>>> resource that makes that statement. logically, i see three ways how the 
>>> non-httpness of the identified resource could be established:
>>> 1. string matching with a magic prefix
>>> 2. the 303 returned when dereferencing the uri
>>> 3. embedded metadata in the returned resource
>> The TAG reached consensus on 15 Jun 2005 to use option 2.
> How does this work when I'm not online? How does my software discover that
> there's something special about this URL?

that's easy to answer: it doesn't work. it would only work if you used 
the "magic http prefix" approach in which you take certain http-uri 
prefixes and essentially treat them as semantically significant. whether 
that's something that would be a good idea is another question, and the 
w3c says you should first do the 303 dance.

what's more worrying: even if you do dereference the uri and get a 303, 
you still only know that the uri *could* reference a non-http resource. 
finding out whether it actually does (which probably would be the case 
for a web server based on the w3c tag consensus) or not (some other web 
server sending a 303 for whatever reason) needs something more, and i am 
currently unsure whether option (1) or (3) of the above is preferred.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 03:37:39 UTC