minor note: Content-Location could be used to provide a URI for the
descriptor document, thus Conneg compatible out off the box.
Nathan wrote:
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
