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RE: RESTful operations on document fragments

• From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:51:46 -0600

This was the same challenge in HyTime which is why resolvers were separated
from the link itself (I've forgotten the formal terminology.).  Hytime went
off the rails because of a) excessive abstraction and b) extending it to
mean all formats therefore the need for resolvers in any kind of data format
or system for that matter.

It's tough to get around NOTATIONs realistically even if you wedge new
syntax and naming into it.  Somewhere, the link has to point to the address
(no names and locations aren't the same thing), and the address has to be
passed to a resolver that can return something from the data format it is in
to a consumer that can read what is returned.

I know you know all of this.   I just don't know quite how one extends the
addressing possible without opening that can of worms.

len


From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...] 

However, document fragments are typically identified through the 
fragment identifier, the #xxxx that is the usual domain of tools like 
XPointer.  The fragment identifier is not normally sent to the server, 
and is supposed to be processed on the client side, depending on the 
MIME type of the response. [3]

That makes good sense in the GET context which has been typical of most 
Web operations.  However, it raises a challenge in the RESTful 
processing context.

Am I required to perform RESTful operations only against a complete 
resource?

<snip />

The problem of resource granularity seems like a question that is 
starting to need a more general and at least somewhat flexible solution.

(Rails' current RESTfulness can dodge this because each database record 
is treated as a resource, and that's the usual granularity developers 
work at.  It only gets weird when you look beyond regular tables to 
irregular documents.)

Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
Retiring XML troublemaker
http://simonstl.com/

[1] - 
<http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/01/rails_rest_and_anarchist_xml_1.h
tml>

[2] - <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html>

[3] - <http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html>

[4] - <http://bitworking.org/news/296/How-To-Do-RESTful-Partial-Updates>

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