Re: HTTP Methods

Please read http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html.

MGET is intended to retrieve descriptions not (other kinds of) 
representations.

Regards,

Patrick


On Feb 25, 2004, at 16:20, ext Robert Hahn wrote:

>
>
> I'm a bit late to the MGET discussion, so I'm not sure if I'm aware of 
> all the thinking behind it, but based on your recent emails, Patrick, 
> I'm assuming that MGET fetches all the possible representations with 
> one URI call.
>
> If that's the case, can't we simply gzip all the representations and 
> send it to the client to pick and choose from?
>
> And if my assumption is incorrect, (and I'm meant to understand that 
> MGET fetches a menu of possible representations to choose from) then 
> consider the following notion:
>
> A client wants to select one of possibly many representations.  The 
> client doesn't know what's available, and so sends the following URI:
>
> http://example.com/foo.*
>
> The server, upon getting it, parses through the URI, finds the 
> wildcard, and makes a determination on what to send back.  I can see 
> two ways to go about this.
>
> One way is inspired by the means that the server determines which 
> language translation to send back to the server. I seem to recall 
> seeing a weighted list of possible languages that I think is sent by 
> the browser to help the server decide whether to send a page in, say, 
> English or French, and if English is not available, select the next 
> most weighted candidate language.  I unfortunately don't know what 
> spec (or part thereof) that feature comes from, but it seems to me 
> that it could be generalized to any sort of representation, not just 
> representations based on language.  Since filename extensions are a 
> dime a dozen, I suggest that the list of expected representations 
> comprise of mime types instead of filename extensions.
>
> The other way is to have the server send back a 'menu', have the 
> client choose something off of the menu, and use that as the default 
> for further transactions (perhaps by storing the menu selection as a 
> cookie).  When I get some spare time, I intend to prototype this 
> method on my site to see how it would work out.
>
> -rh
>
>
> On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, at 08:44  AM, Patrick Stickler wrote:
>
>> What if the resource denoted by the URI has an RDF/XML representation
>> yet you don't want the representation of the resource, you want its
>> description.
>>
>> Content negotation is about selecting between representations.
>>
>> While it might be possible to make it work for differentiating
>> between representations and descriptions, it precludes the ability
>> to select between different encodings of a description and also
>> (even if a special MIME type is used for descriptions) does not
>> make it possible to ask for descriptions of descriptions as opposed
>> to a representation of the description itself.
>>
> ---
> Robert Hahn,
> http://www.tenletters.com/rhahn
>
>

--

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

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 09:32:05 UTC