[Cosmo-dev] Magic URL's

[Brian Moseley]

On 9/14/06, Mikeal Rogers <mikeal at osafoundation.org> wrote:

> What are the advantages to this strategy rather than the other ones on the
> table, specifically the 'RSS style auto-discovery' and 'magic 301 redirect'
> that were first mentioned when Ted started the thread?

my proposal is superior to the "magic redirect" one because, well, it
doesn't rely on magic. it's wrong to make the assumption that any
client that GETs a resource is capable of or interested in receiving a
web ui page. so how would the server distinguish between those clients
that want to GET the resource content and those that want the web ui
page for the resource?

the autodiscovery mechanism is actually complentary to my proposal
rather than competitive. providing an introspection document for a
resource would keep chandler (and other clients) from having to
understand how to construct the various urls for a resource. the
clients would just have to know how to construct the autodiscovery url
and how to process the introspection document. i'm all for providing
this capability.

btw - having read through the scooby 0.3 workflows proposal and design
meeting notes, i see nothing to indicate that we are required to have
a single url that can both be clicked on in email to open the sharee's
browser to the web ui *and* be used to subscribe to the collection in
chandler. in fact the workflows pdf explicitly shows these as separate
urls (i think in scenario c or d). perfect match with my proposal.