Re: Alternative to 303 response: Description-ID: header

Ian Davis wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 01:56 +0000, Ian Davis wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 19:53 -0500, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>>     
>>> I did wonder about the following:  in the case when the URI is not of  
>>> document, when currently we use 303,
>>> then the  server can return a document *about* it with  an extra  
>>> header to explain to the browser
>>> that it is actually giving you a description of it not the content of  
>>> it.  (Pick a header name)
>>>       
>> Strange synchronicity... I posted the same idea a few minutes ago to my
>> blog:
>>
>> http://iandavis.com/blog/2007/12/303-asymmetry
>>
>> I called my header "resource-description"
Since it is possible one could be using (though I haven't found an
example in the wild) of a 303 to forward from one information resource
to another, this "description header" could then definitely tell the
user agent they got forwarded to a descriptive page from something
that's a non-information resource.

In addition, it would then be great to have something like the generic
resource ontology standardized, so we could also put RDFa in the HTML
(or use conneg over it to serve RDF/XML, etc.) to say about the
descriptive page one got to from a 303: "Hey, you got 303 redirected
from a non-information resource, and the URI of the non-information
resource should be X." The one problem with that is that  other people
could independently use 303 to get you to that same URI, but then it's
the owner of the descriptive page's prerogative to say what their page
describes. In this manner, even if the user-agent lost the header info,
they could have some RDF to tell them what types of resources they've
been following their nose around.
>> Actually the ideas are not the same, but share some similarities. My
>> header points to the description of a resource, yours indicates that the
>> response entity _is_ the description. 
>>
>> Ian
>>
>>     


-- 
		-harry

Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh 
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 03:14:33 UTC