On 6/17/11 12:35 PM, Dave Reynolds wrote:
> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
> express my review in RDF, using the page's URI as the identifier.
Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
Let's look at this from a slight different angle. What does HTTP 200 OK
mean? I believe it's how a server indicates to a client that an Address
(it created) is functional .
I believe Tim is saying: HTTP 200 OK is integral to the Web in a general
sense. This is behavior backed into AWWW that underlies the ubiquitous
WWW albeit the information space dimension re., Linked Documents. An
HTML resource is still a resource, and 200 OK doesn't care about the
resource type.
As I stated in an earlier post, handling indirection on the server (this
is basically what we did in our very first Linked Data server
implementation, pre. Banff 2007) puts a burden on the clients i.e., it
really sets an expectation that the client is willing and capable of
doing Name and Address disambiguation by analyzing the data returned.
Now, if an application commits 100% to self-describing data expressed in
graph form, serialized in a variety of representations, that would work,
but in reality this is actually worse than what we are grappling with
right now re. paths of least resistance en route to broadening and
accelerating Linked Data uptake. Thus, like all things, its at best just
another option with some consequences that could ultimately compromise
the big picture goal.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
