Re: RE> Queries could be done with a layer of indirection

On Jul 31,  3:34pm, Gavin Nicol wrote:

>    http://foo.bar.com/myrdb?row=1
>
> and
>
>    http://foo.bar.com/mybook?search=hypermedia+url+i18n;easy=as+pie
>
> can, and, I believe, should, be treated differently. In the first case,
> you have what is effectively a deterministic address, in the second
> case you are dealing with user input.

In both cases you are dealing with user input - and whether either is
deterministic over time depends on whether the underlying data gets
updated.

The server does not know whether the user typed something to construct
the URL, or whether the entire URL was embeedded in an HTML page; it
only knows it has a request.

Saying that

>    http://foo.bar.com/myrdb/1

is deterministic is also not necessarily true. It depends, among other
things on other headers supplied with the request and with imponderables
on the server side regarding updates.

> There are cases, obviously, where people might go off, execute a
> search, and find something interesting to pass along to a friend. In
> such a case, some people would argue that you should be able to write
> down the URL *including* the query. I disagree, and think that there
> are better ways of accomplishing the same thing. In a reasonable
> hypermedia system, you should be able to create, and name, a query link
> that people can link to.

That is the crux of the problem - GET urls can be written down (they
need not be short, but they can be written). What you get back is not
necessarily what someone else got back, of course - regardless of the
presence of a server-side specialiser character (ie ? )


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 1 August 1997 12:31:05 UTC