Hi,
I believe TimBL has suggested this previously with a 208, however both
207 and 208 are already assigned or mentioned in various DAV
communities, thus 209 or higher would have to be used I believe.
Personally, I like the idea a lot, and the usefulness for IoT is great
too - any convergence between the semantic web and IoT, especially at
HTTP and descriptor level, would be great.
Best,
Nathan
Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
Hi all!
I hope it is OK that I just burst in here without having followed the
discussion. Admittedly, I haven't been terribly interested, I've always
enjoyed the 303 dance, I wrote the code and it was easy, and the IR/NIR
distinction has always served me well. However, I also see that it is a bit
painful to have to do follow a redirect, both for end users and for code, and
the bit about cachability, CORS problems, etc makes it clear there is room for
improvement.
So, how about a new HTTP response code, e.g. 207 Description Follows? I.e., it
is like 200 OK, but makes it clear that what you're dereferencing is not an
IR. Instead, you're getting a description of the thing.
This would have implications well beyond our community, GETting the URI of a
device in the Internet of Things would also reasonably return a 207. Without
having thought too deeply about this, I suggest this means it satisfies the
orthogonality of specifications constraint.
I just quickly hacked a server to test how browsers would react to a 207 code,
and all browser I have did it gracefully. I therefore conjecture that clients
needing to know the IR/NIR distinction will be able to figure it out by looking
at the status code only, those that need not, would not need to be bothered.
Deployment costs should thus be very low. We're also working to get our code
into Debian (older versions are already in Ubuntu), so if we have this settled
before Debian Wheezy freezes in June, it would be available in mainstream
hosting solutions late this year. I think that's a key, because many users
control very little of their server setup, and custom code is "dangerous", but
with the support of Debian the costs for hosters are marginal.
Naively Yours,
Kjetil
