I’ve long been frustrated with HTTP content negotiation. It doesn’t do what I need.<\/p>\n
If you’ve never encountered this, when a web request is made there’s an optional header, something like<\/p>\n
Which says what formats the client (you) is able to accept, and it’s preferences. The start of this blog post<\/a> gives a more full explanation. There’s also a way to negotiate what languages you prefer your content in, and a proposed system for asking for versions from a specific date or time<\/a>.<\/p>\n My annoyance is specifically with the fact that what you ask for is very human-web-browser centric. You ask for formats your system is capable of accepting, not that you actually want. Why does this annoy me? Because if I have to give variations on the server a custom MIME Type, if I want to content negotiate for them specifically. All formats I work with are viewable as text, and most are XML, but if they have some wacky mimetype, like application\/x-southampton23 then nothing else will understand it as XML, which is just annoying. For example, an RSS1.0 feed is I feel like content negotiation is missing a bit of inherritence. ie. If I ask for Imagine the web-browser walking into a fancy resturant and ordering soup. The waiter brings over a dish and says, “here you are sir, Consomm\u00e9”. The browser refuses to eat it because it doesn’t know what “Consomm\u00e9” is.<\/p>\n Now lets run that again, with a less pretentious waiter (in this analogy, the waiter is the web server). The soup is ordered and the waiter says “Here you are sir, Soup”. Which is not only true, but it’s certain to be understood by the customer, who eats their Consomm\u00e9 saying “mmm, nice soup”.<\/p>\n The other very useful thing would be to expect browsers to undersand abstract MIME types, which have no specific serialisation, but a number of sub variants. For example:<\/p>\n Where Discribing the various properties of a file containing data as output from a research activity will also require some richers definitions, but maybe not in mime. I’m still thinking about this but I think it would be best to describe files, and sets-of-files, by things which they conform to. MIME Types could be part of this, but also what the data describes. For example; one record might require the following ‘tags’ to be usefully discovered<\/p>\n Single File, XML File, CML File, Describes Single Molecule, Describes Crystal, Describes Organic Crystal, Reuse License allows Attribution-Only reuse<\/p>\n Admittedly chemists are already doing pretty well in this field, and maybe I’m trying to solve too general a case…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve long been frustrated with HTTP content negotiation. It doesn’t do what I need. If you’ve never encountered this, when a web request is made there’s an optional header, something like Accept:text\/html,application\/xhtml+xml,application\/xml;q=0.9,*\/*;q=0.8 Which says what formats the client (you) is able to accept, and it’s preferences. The start of this blog post gives a more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9430,18147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-http","category-research-data"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Accept:text\/html,application\/xhtml+xml,application\/xml;q=0.9,*\/*;q=0.8<\/code><\/p>\napplication\/rss+xml<\/code>, according to StackOverflow. However it’s also valid application\/rdf+xml<\/code>, text\/xml<\/code> and text\/plain<\/code>.<\/p>\nServers should handle MIME-inherritance<\/h3>\n
text\/xml or <\/code>text\/html<\/code> and the server has only\u00a0application\/x-southampton-xml-3 <\/code>available for that resource, then it should give me the application\/rss+xml<\/code> document but tell me it’s text\/xml,<\/code> which it is, and my web browser would display it as XML .<\/p>\nServers should handle ‘abstract’ MIME types<\/h3>\n
Accept:application\/rdf+xml,application\/rdf;q=0.9<\/code><\/p>\napplication\/rdf <\/code>is a super-class for all RDF serialisations. The above header line *should* say that I want RDF+XML, but failing that any<\/em> RDF serialisation will do.<\/p>\nResearch Data File Formats<\/h3>\n