Re: Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Richard Cyganiak<richard@cyganiak.de> wrote:
> 3. If a resource has a representation, then a GET to its URI should be
> answered by 200. If not, then 303, 404 or 410 would be fine choices.

This *should* is not warranted. As there is often no way to include
structured information *about* a resource in-band of the
representation (sense http/awww), or to include it in a way that is
predictable by the requester, is a perfectly reasonable choice to use
303 to interpose and therefore provide a way of supplying this "about"
information. In those cases where someone is confident enough that a
200 response would have been appropriate, that one can supply
information *about* the resource (in RDF, for instance) means that
there is an opportunity to indicate (with the potential for being much
more precise than http) where that "representation" can be fetched
from.

-Alan