On 11/4/10 12:56 PM, David Wood wrote:
Hi all,
This is a horrible idea, for the following reasons (in my opinion and suitably
caveated):
- Some small number of people and organizations need to provide back-links on
the Web since the Web doesn't have them. 303s provide a generic mechanism for
that to occur. URL curation is a useful and proper activity on the Web, again
in my opinion.
- Overloading the use of 200 (OK) for metadata creates an additional ambiguity
in that the address of a resource is now conflated with the address of a
resource described by metadata.
- W3C TAG findings such as http-range-14 are really very difficult to overcome
socially.
- Wide-spread mishandling of HTTP content negotiation makes it difficult if not
impossible to rely upon. Until we can get browser vendors and server vendors
to handle content negotiation in a reasonable way, reliance on it is not a
realistic option. That means that there needs to be an out-of-band mechanism
to disambiguate physical, virtual and conceptual resources on the Web. 303s
plus http-range-14 provide enough flexibility to do that; I'm not convinced
that overloading 200 does.
/me ducks for the inevitable mud slinging this list has become.
AMEN!
Kingsley
Regards,
Dave
On Nov 4, 2010, at 12:33, Harry Halpin wrote:
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Ian Davis<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
In a purely personal capacity, I like the approach of just using 200,
i.e. with RDFa or whatever, rather than 303. If we want to
disambiguate URIs, the IRW ontology [1] offers a nice class called
"nonInformationResource" and "InformationResource" that one can use to
disambiguate. See this paper [2] on "an Ontology of Resources for
Linked Data" for a walk-through example.
My reasoning is not architectural, but simply efficiency. It is rather
inefficient to have a redirection in the form of a 303 if one can get
the same info without using 303.
Note that Microsoft's oData may one day be a serious competitor to
Linked Data, and if you asked many programmers and open data people
who are not already committed to RDF if they would use Atom + HTTP GET
and no redirects over RDF/XML and a weird 303 redirect, I think the
answer would be rather self-evident.
[1]http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/web/irw.owl
[2]http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2009/papers/ldow2009_paper19.pdf
Cheers,
Ian
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
