Hi all,

This is a horrible idea, for the following reasons (in my opinion and suitably
caveated):

- Some small number of people and organizations need to provide back-links on
the Web since the Web doesn't have them. 303s provide a generic mechanism for
that to occur. URL curation is a useful and proper activity on the Web, again
in my opinion.

- Overloading the use of 200 (OK) for metadata creates an additional ambiguity
in that the address of a resource is now conflated with the address of a
resource described by metadata.

- W3C TAG findings such as http-range-14 are really very difficult to overcome
socially.

- Wide-spread mishandling of HTTP content negotiation makes it difficult if not
impossible to rely upon. Until we can get browser vendors and server vendors to
handle content negotiation in a reasonable way, reliance on it is not a
realistic option. That means that there needs to be an out-of-band mechanism to
disambiguate physical, virtual and conceptual resources on the Web. 303s plus
http-range-14 provide enough flexibility to do that; I'm not convinced that
overloading 200 does.

/me ducks for the inevitable mud slinging this list has become.

Regards, Dave

On Nov 4, 2010, at 12:33, Harry Halpin wrote: