Re: HTTP Range 14

On 04/03/2012 22:41, Graham Klyne wrote:
> Technically, I believe the current muddle can indeed be made to "just 
> work". But the web is more than just a technical system - it's people 
> too.  And I think there are times when what people expect diverges 
> from what the technology delivers, leading to outcomes that may be 
> technically correct, but not useful in the sense of not meeting 
> people's expectations.  If we can find a narrative that makes better 
> sense of the present technical architecture, which I think Jonathan's 
> recent postings could lead towards, then that will be great.  But 
> until then, I won't completely close my mind to alternative solutions, 
> even if that means additional URI schemes.
>
I agree. The current design is verbose and unintuitive. Using an address 
with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol to identify real-world things works 
OK, but it's very counter-intuitive. People on this list have no 
confusion about URI/URL but every new person trying to learn this stuff, 
does.

The tdb: protocol doesn't break anything. It aids linking by making it 
easy to use canonical pages to identify things. A web browser doesn't 
need to support it -- most of things in question won't be resolvable 
because they are things. Sure, a 303 can get you to a data page or HTML 
page, but that's even more confusing. Most web programmers don't grok 
content negotiation. Our goal really should be to start having linked 
data produced by the masses of people who know a bit of PHP. I believe 
the reason we still haven't seen the network effect kick-in for linked 
data is that it's too hard for people who don't care as much as early 
adopters do. It's got to be achievable by busy people who just skim the 
instructions.

My personal success criteria is when the main topic of discussion is how 
to deal with spammers trying to inject triples into trusted data sources.



-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

Received on Monday, 5 March 2012 06:54:22 UTC