On Nov 4, 2010, at 13:14, Ian Davis wrote:

Sure. I should have said that *PURLs and DOIs* provide a general solution to
back links and use 303s.

Exploitation of relationships between resources on the Web remains incomplete
for an excellent reason: The very design decision that allowed the Web to scale
(distribution of resource servers) removed the ability to monitor links
bidirectionally (the link maintenance problem). Prior to the Web, all hypertext
systems were centralized and all included back-links.

Some services exist to track and retain inter-resource metadata, such as
Technorati. Technorati requires a publisher to register with them so that
inter-resource monitoring may be accomplished. PURLs and DOIs allow other third
parties, including the general public, to provide links to arbitrary resources
that may be maintained with time. If a resource that you point to moves, you
just change the URL that a PURL or DOI resolves to.

303s come into the picture when the resource that you point to is not
(technically, *may* not be) an information resource, but the use case is the
same.

Yes, I agree that your post addresses that case. Your solution is a reasonable
one and is even implementable. I've had similar thoughts in the past. However,
I don't see a need to get rid of the 303 to implement your proposal.

I agree that conneg seems to be back in favor recently. I suppose that is
because we in the Linked Data community are not relying on browsers as much as
the syntactic Web folks. Conneg remains a problem in browser handling.

I also agree that your proposal isn't dependent on conneg. However, consider
the original use cases for conneg: You could serve various representations
based upon the context of a request. That is, you could serve either metadata
or data (as well as format variations). In the context of this discussion, I
would argue that conneg is another way to get to metadata about a resource by
resolving the URL for the resource.

Oh, I hope so. Let's try to do that, please :D

Regards, Dave