Hi Breton,
Sounds good to me. There is no "formal" meaning of semicolon, but
since it is "newly discovered" we are free to define our own
semantics, as long as they:
a) Don't confuse anyone (including proxies)
b) Are implemented using hypermedia (e.g., as links)
and thus don't require changes to servers or (uncaring) clients
In the context of this particular list, I'm leaning towards using
semicolon to define "aspects" of a resource. We'll see if we can do
this consistently enough that at least we don't confuse ourselves...
-- Ernie P.
On Apr 21, 2006, at 10:27 AM, Breton Slivka wrote:
It would seem that my discovery of a rarely used aspect of the HTTP
url scheme, namely the semicolon ; has led to perhaps a level of
unjustified excitement and advocacy. Intent is very difficult to
gleam from carefully reading a spec, despite, or perhaps because of
the high standards specs are held to for preciseness and lack of
ambiguity, which encourage a sort of unnatural writing style which
in all honesty is hard to read and easy to misinterpret. That
aside, I have a question after reading a set of documents by Tim
Berners-Lee, which are more geared toward the intentional side of
things rather than the specification side of things, which you will
find here: < http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html >
Regarding the issues I'm concerned with, this is my interpretation
of the document, and you can tell me whether it's incorrect or not:
*For REST, it is mostly important that GET have no side effects,
and anything which does have side effects be implemented with POST
(or mail).
*forward slashes, as mapped to unix heirarchical structures are
used merely as a matter of convenience, and due to the principals
of opacity, are not neccesarily significant to the resolution of a
URI, except regarding the resolution of relative URI's in which
case, such interpretation should be defined per URI scheme, with
client support. Forward slashes do not indicate a resource, but the
entire URI indicates the resource, and it's entirely up to the
server how to find that resource based on the URL. No procedure for
internal URI resolution is explicitly defined.
*That http defines such a scheme for resolving relative URI's for /
style urls, but not yet for semicolons as indicators of parameters
(though TBL provides such a scheme as a possibility for
implementation)
*Therefore, virtually any symbol, including but not limited to
forward slashes and semicolons can be used for the purposes of
mapping to arbitrary data topologies, at the discretion of the URI
scheme designer, which can be interpreted and resolved by the
server in whatever way is appropriate. In addition, a great deal of
this flexibility is left in the http scheme to be used at the
discretion of server programmers. As long as opacity is observed,
and URI's remain idempotent nouns.
*To this add the additional constraint given by roy fielding that
this can only be done as long as the nature of the URI scheme is
clearly communicated by the server to the client. In other words,
there is no assumption made that the client will be able to infer a
URI scheme from a base URI without explicit communication that such
a URI scheme is in use.
*Notable exception is the # fragment identifier which is reserved
for use by clients, and to be defined when registering the mime
type for a document.
*TBL then demonstrates the flexibility of URI's by laying out his
Matrix URI scheme, that is using the ; and = symbols to specify a
matrix information space, which is distinctly incompatible with a
heirarchical space. This does not imply that ; has any inherent
meaning relative to the REST or uri model, but as a scheme
designer, TBL is using it to represent a type of information
topology being made available by a server.
If one is to take all the above statements as true and accurate
interpretations of REST, then solutions to certain problems become
available, which are not possible, or are awkward under a naive
surface impression that REST requires URLS to contain only forward
slashes / to represent information topologies. It is beginning to
look to me that this impression has more to do with Aesthetics, and
search engine technologies, than any specific requirements of REST.
A problem this interpretation potentially solves, for instance, is
that of multiple views of the same information resource. Usually,
this would be accomplished through content negotiation. However
this is only effective if your multiple views all have distinct
mime types. If you have for example, a resource such as < http://
example.com/blog/posts/53 > representing an article on a blog, you
may have a non editable view, and an editable view.
In an ideal world this sort of thing could be specified using a
fragment identifier, such as < http://example.com/blog/posts/
53#edit >, however for this to work on a practical level, it
requires client support which is not likely, and somewhat
incompatible with the fragment identifier scheme defined for html/xml
Another option is to use the forward slash < http://example.com/
blog/posts/53/edit >
However it seems logically innacurate to state that a view is a
hierarchical child of the resource, rather than something more
lateral, or directly related.
If the bullet points above are accurate, then it becomes possible
and reasonable to use a semi colon, or any other appropriate symbol
to represent a lateral space, such as a view. Matrix notation seems
appropriate, since such a view system can be seen as a "matrix" (or
tensor) with 1 axis, and english words representing named points
along that axis.
< http://example.com/blog/posts/53;view=edit > < http://example.com/
blog/posts/53;view=display> < http://example.com/blog/posts/
53;view=hatom>. This makes sense to me as viewing a slice or
subsection of a single resource, which includes multiple possible
views.
The caveats being how relative URL's are resolved by clients,
whether the server supports this level of flexibility, and whether
appropriate mechanisms are employed for informing the client of the
URI scheme in use (such as hrefs along all points on a matrix
allowing navigation)
This may be overintellectualizing a simple problem, but the main
purpose of this post is to verify if I have my bulleted
interpretations correct, otherwise my conclusion may be false.
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