UWS as a REST protocol

[Doug Tody]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Matthew Graham wrote:

> You're right about the HTTP Accept header but this is difficult to set from a 
> browser.

I'm about a week behind on this thread, but HTTP Accept actually only
deals with what the client is prepared to accept at the level of the
HTTP protocol; the client says it can accept any of these formats and
it is up to the service to pick the best one.  The FORMAT stuff in a
DAL access reference on the other hand, deals with what an upstream
client requests for a data format (after having reviewed a set of
options specified by the service and having picked one), which is
quite a different thing.

Also; some of this could be moved to the level of the HTTP protocol
(protocol level compression is a prime example) but this is inadvisable
for functionality which we may want to map transparently onto multiple
protocols.  HTTP Accept is an example of something which we want to
deal with transparently at the level of the wire protocol; HTTP in
this case.

 	- Doug



> John Taylor wrote:
>> 
>> (getting in here before Norman Gray does)....I understand that it would be 
>> more RESTful to use the http Accept header, rather than an explicit FORMAT 
>> parameter.  If we were really hardcore we'd also use URIs that are 
>> dereferencable using standard protocols....so VOSpace resources would be 
>> name http://something rather than vos://something.  Is that possible 
>> Matthew, or wouldn't that be compatible with the VOSpace spec?
>> 
>> John