Hi Norman,

On Sat, 2010-11-06 at 22:45 +0000, Norman Gray wrote: [ . . . ]

I don't think that is feasible. After all, what's so special about RDF? And how would the client even know whether RDF were returned? Almost any serialization can be turned into RDF. Suppose XML is returned. Is that RDF? A GRDDL transformation can cause it to be viewed as RDF? And what about a plain HTML page? Surely in that case the URI would identify the web page. But what if there were some RDFa tags embedded? Suddenly it *doesn't* identify the web page? Even if the client ignores those tags?

No, I think it makes more sense to acknowledge that the ambiguity *has* been created by the server both returning the 200 response and sending a document saying that the URI identifies a toucan, but applications that are troubled by this ambiguity should use the provenance of the information to decide bits of information to use or ignore -- in this case ignoring the information given in the HTTP response code in favor of the information given in the RDF document.

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