Re: Making MGET more GET-friendly?

On Mar 10, 2004, at 16:03, ext Sandro Hawke wrote:

>
>
>
>>> If you assume that - and given the above 1:1; would it not be simpler
>>> to simply
>>> postulate an extra header:
>>>
>>> 	Characteristics-Location: http://www.example.com/ex.rdf
>>>
>>> in the reply of any GET ? In particular that of the GET of
>>> http://www.example.com/ex.
>>> And making sure you -also- get it when a cheaper HEAD is done ? Or
>>> does that
>>> not accomplish all you want ?
>>
>> No. It doesn't (for me). Please see the URIQA FAQ about the 
>> shortcomings
>> of the header approach...
>
> It says:
>
>>    Why not first use a HEAD request to get another URI via which the
>>    description can be accessed?
>>
>>           Firstly, this requires an agent to make two requests to the
>>           server, rather than just one, which is inherently
>>           inefficient. Secondly, while each description is a resource
>>           in its own right and can be denoted by a distinct URI, it
>>           is seldom necessary to give descriptions distinct identity
>>           and therefore unnecessarily burdensome to require that
>>           every description of every resource be given an explicit
>>           URI simply in order to be able to access a resource's
>
> I agree the round trip is a cost; I see no evidence to support your
> argument "it is seldom necessary to give descriptions distinct
> identity...".    I need to do it all the time.
>
> Architecturally, you seem to be advocating making a whole bunch of
> very interesting data not addressable by URIs.   Seems like a step
> backwards.

You have misunderstood me. I'm not advocating not denoting descriptions
with distinct URIs. The Nokia implementation provides a URI for every
description.

I was pointing out that, aside from other approaches, URIQA does
not mandate that such URIs be provided.

>
> I think the extra round-trip is worth the cost,

You'll have to back that up with some motivating arguments.

Patrick


> and advocate a
> "Metadata-Location" header for information resources, and also a "303
> See Other" redirect for non-information resources (eg cars, dogs, the
> Sun), to get browsers to do the right thing while maintaining strict
> semantic distinctions.
>
>      -- sandro
>
>
>

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 07:31:21 UTC