Re: Bookmark 'stability'

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Jan Algermissen
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> - Should all URIs a server makes known to clients be considered
>   possible bookmarks?

Yes, absolutely! There is no way to prevent clients from remembering
particular URIs so we must assume that all URIs might be bookmarked.
IME, extensive use of bookmarking is required for many -- maybe even
most -- clients that do non-trivial work. In these situations what is
bookmarked will be entirely dependent on the application that client
is running, not on what the server thinks are the "steady states".

Bookmarkability is not a contract, though. A server may respond to
requests of a resource with a 404 or 410 at any time for any reason
but we must accept that doing so may break some clients. Obviously, in
the real world resources are going to disappear. That makes it
incumbent upon clients to handle, as gracefully as possible, the
situation where the bookmarked resource is no longer available.

Peter
barelyenough.org