Re: A new HTTP response code say 209

On 9 Jan 2014, at 12:57, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> Henry Story writes:
> 
>> It is a bad idea to put semantics into media types. Media types are
>> there to help interpret the representation coming back from the
>> resource, not for describing the resource itself ( since after all
>> the same resource could have a number of different representation in
>> different formats, as we do in RDF land regularly )
> 
>> ...
> 
>> What is wanted is something that does what 303 does, but returns the content immediately. 
> 
> Right -- to short-circuit this, in the TAG f2f this morning, I offered
> the following paraphrase for the 2xx proposal:
> 
>  A 2xx response code signals all and only the short-circuiting of a
>  303 response, with the content of what a GET to the Location header
>  of the 303 would have had, and a Content-location header giving what
>  would have been the Location of the 303.
> 
> So no new 'semantics', in the sense that whatever you believe 303
> means wrt what the relation between what you originally asked for, and
> what you _eventually_ get, holds for 2xx between what you originally
> asks for and what you get _immediately_.

Sounds good. I think one should perhaps also speak about the meaning of the 
headers. Should they not also be interpreted as if they had been returned 
on a request on the Content-Location URL had it been requested directly?

This is important for the Web-Linking RFC, for example

  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988#section-5.1

[[
 By default, the context of a link conveyed in the Link header field
   is the IRI of the requested resource.
]]

Btw, I wonder if a 3xx code would not be more
appropriate. 3xx indicates to all that we are in 
the redirect space, which may be an important intuition worth
holding onto.  Anyway, whatever is decided it would be
a great step forward.


> 
> ht
> -- 
>       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
>                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
> [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]

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Received on Thursday, 9 January 2014 12:45:33 UTC