Re: [httpRange-14] Conneg and Acceptable HTTP Variants

Let me repeat what Dan has said before - we know where Tim is going.  To 
make his document model work, he must coex us into believing the 
equivalent transformation or that sort of thing.  I don't, I guess I 
never will, because, by that line of reasoning, it means that Hamlet 
should have an equivalent RDF representation.  I don't believe that.

Inequivalent  or non-acceptable transformation is a bug?  Please define 
those "equivalence" or "acceptability" first and then tell us if a 
machine can understand it.  Besides, what can you do about those bugged 
resource? take them down? mark the page with certain tag?

Let's not to forget, we design an engineer artifact with the intend to 
help people do more things, not less!  Market economy and evolution work 
because the systems only provide mechanisms for selecting a winning 
directionality but to point out one. I don't think web is any different.

Xiaoshu

Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>>
>> Exactly.
>> Tim
>>
>> On 2007-12 -15, at 12:56, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Tim gave us a rule of thumb about what kind of HTTP variants it's
>>> acceptable to conneg between which caused some controversy:
>>>
>>> "When people conneg between HTML and RDF, the HTML is
>>> generated from the RDF. Else it is a bug." - TimBL, in [1]
>>>
>>> Dan Brickley was the first to cry wolf about this, asking how an
>>> acceptable level of degradation is defined. Kjetil Kjernsmo asked
>>> about a specific use case, of an RDF FOAF file generated from RDFa or
>>> GRDDL.
>>>
>>> What most of you may not have seen is that TimBL later gave Kjetil a
>>> very useful answer [2], which I repeat here:
>>>
>>> <timbl> kjetilkWork, re http://www.ski-o.com/user/kjetil you could
>>> offer both. Which would you want a person to see who is using
>>> FFox+Tabulator extension?
>
> A cheap shot perhaps, but since you mention it: not everyone can see. 
> To some, an SVG version of an image resource might be lossy (as a 
> cartoon vs a photo); to others, it might be vastly richer (eg. see 
> [1]). There's no intrinsic quality ordering: brevity might be best, 
> for someone on an expensive GPRS connection (eg. me, yesterday --- I 
> spent 5GBP in a mature of minutes trying to get online via my phone).
>
> If you don't want to be presented with the application/rdf+xml flavour 
> of a document, perhaps it's best not to configure your browser to ask 
> for it? That said, I've not tried the FF Tabulator addon yet, I'll 
> give it a go.
>
> [...]
>
> OK, my Firefox is now Tabulator-enriched. And the FOAF spec looks ... 
> even more cryptic than normal! Especially if I go to a link that has a 
> # in it, eg http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_openid ... resulting UI 
> is utterly baffling, but strangely evocative :)  The interface I get 
> if I visit http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ is much less confusing (rather 
> handy in fact), ... but I don't understand why Firefox couldn't 
> generate it for me as a sidebar to the main HTML document. A 
> super-smart semantic browser ought to be able to figure out that an 
> HTML version is available, and have some way of presenting it to me.
>
> But back to the main point, I'm not defending CONNEG as a perfect 
> technology. It's missing all kinds of things, esp around discovery. 
> But I don't see the "some variants are unacceptably lossy" argument as 
> persuasive.
>
> cheers,
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG-access/
>
>
>

Received on Sunday, 16 December 2007 02:23:04 UTC