At Tue, 1 Jun 2010 19:16:36 -0400,
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> 
> That's a pretty reasonable way to approach it, I like Erik's
> thinking on this. Although I'm not sure if a content in a URL vs one
> negotiated via HTTP headers are quite "entirely different" like Erik
> says -- rather, it's a question of whether you intend to
> identify/refer/link to a specific version/representation of the
> document, or the overall document itself, no?

Thanks, Jonathan. I seem to have written “quite different” rather than
“entirely different”, but I agree that they are related, conceptually.
They are just different resources as far as the web architecture is
concerned.
 
> I'd also note that in an open search description context, you don't
> need/can't have a "free parameter" for this, because it's baked into
> the opensearch URL template "type" parameter. It however would be
> appropriate to apply an OpenSearch URL template fixed to type X,
> which has a URL that has httpAccept=X in it, where the X is _not_
> parameterized in the OpenSearch Desc URL Template, it's just fixed.
> 
> I'm curious how/whether Erik's analysis would apply to other HTTP
> headers that SRU (at least 2.0?) also makes available as query
> parameters too. Charset, encoding, language? I guess those are kind
> of analagous, there are times where you do need to
> refer/identify/link to a document in a very specific encoding,
> charset, or language. Other times where you just want to identify
> the overall document, and let content negotiation pick the
> appropriate representation (which could (should?) be done by 3xx
> redirecting to the specific appropriate representation with the
> encoding, charset, language, and/or content type fixed into the URL
> itself?).
>
> […]

Accept-Encoding is a little strange. It is used for gzip or deflate
compression, largely. I cannot imagine needing a link to a version
that is gzipped.

It is also hard to imagine why a link would want to specify the
charset to be used, possibly overriding a client’s preference. If my
browser says it can only supports UTF-8 or latin-1, it is probably
telling the truth.

best, Erik



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