- From: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>
- Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 13:39:33 +0100
- To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Cc: www-archive@w3.org
Mark Baker wrote, > Hey. Redirecting to www-archive because I said I'd shut up. 8-) Thanks for redirecting to a list I'm not subscribed to ;-) > > You can ask for "something" and get it, yes. But what can you do > > with it once you've got it? > > Right. I don't claim that either approach does anything special > here. > > But I will point out that HTTP permits a client to ask for a specific > format, and that there are several orders of magnitude less data > formats than there are possible methods. Plus, data formats are > standardized, whereas methods rarely are. So you get back application/xml ... so you can parse the result. Is that useful without knowledge of the semantics associated with the document? > > As far as I can see, all you've done is moved the uncertainty > > (alternatively, the requirement for some kind of agreement or > > shared understanding) from the invocation of an operation to the > > interpretation of its result. Can you persuade us that anything > > very much has been gained? > > Intermediaries such as firewalls also understand what "1"/GET means. Sure, but can they tell the difference between, GET /benign-uri and, GET /malicious-uri any more than they can tell the difference between benign and malicious request entities associated with a POST? Granted the parsing costs will favour the URI over the entity, but it's not clear to me that that's likely to be all that big a gain. > > To me it looks like you're squeezing the semantic balloon in in one > > place only to have it bulge out in another. > > It's similar, but this game of balloon squeezing isn't zero-sum. 8-) That might be true, but you haven't persuaded me yet. And who's to say that non-zero-sum doesn't pan out as negative-sum? Cheers, Miles
Received on Sunday, 30 June 2002 08:40:05 UTC