- From: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 20:28:23 +0300
- To: "ext Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@sidar.org>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org, dviner@apache.org
On Apr 10, 2005, at 11:16, ext Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:39:45 +1000, Patrick Stickler > <patrick.stickler@nokia.com> wrote: > >> This is an interesting solution. I definitely agree that it would >> restrict >> the URI creator/originator's freedom. However, what if we just used >> another >> feature of HTTP to handle this? I'm thinking of the Accept HTTP >> header. >> Here's a snippet from the rfc >> (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2068/rfc2068) >> " >> The Accept request-header field can be used to specify certain media >> types which are acceptable for the response. Accept headers can be >> used to indicate that the request is specifically limited to a >> small >> set of desired types, as in the case of a request for an in-line >> image. >> " >> I think it should be feasible to issue this sort of request: >> GET /food/blah HTTP/1.1 >> Host: example.com >> Accept: application/rdf+xml > > Patrick replied >> Not to just jump in and jump out calously, but this has been >> explored quite a bit for quite some time and content negotiation >> is simply not the correct mechanism for this. >> C.f. the FAQ section of http://swdev.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html ... >> Patrick > > I'm not so sure. I can see the problem if you see the world through > URIQA glasses, but I think outside of that it is not a bad answer. The problem with this approach is that it does not work if the resource in question has a "natural" representation encoded in RDF/XML -- thus this approach does not provide a sufficiently general solution. Consider just this one case: You have some URI which identifies an RDF graph. One can use content negotiation to obtain various representations of that graph in various encodings. A description *about* that graph is likely not subsumed by that graph. Yet if you are using conneg to request different representations of the graph, how do you use conneg to request a description of the graph? The graph itself, when serialized as RDF/XML might be hundreds of megabytes (e.g. WordNet, Cyc, etc.) yet the description of the graph will likely be quite small. Content negotation serves a specific and well understood purpose. Overloading it to do something else (even if you can hack it to work here and there) is a bad idea. Regards, Patrick > > cheers > > Chaals > > -- > Charles McCathieNevile Fundacion Sidar > charles@sidar.org +61 409 134 136 http://www.sidar.org
Received on Sunday, 10 April 2005 17:29:10 UTC