Re: Bookmark 'stability'

"Eric J. Bowman" <[email protected]> Sat, 6 Oct 2012 14:09:55 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.services.rest
Organization	Bison Systems Corporation
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Jan Algermissen wrote:
>
> because clients will bookmark, servers pretty much have an implicit
> obligation to maintain URIs over time once they 'got out'.
> 

No way.  If I merge one article into another, what do I do with the old
URI?  HTTP has no semantics of "has been merged" and clearly redirection
would change the semantics of the mapping of the obsolete URI.  There's
nothing wrong with returning 404 with a helpful message body and a link
to the merged resource.  Or a search interface, with a keyword or two
filled out, even.  About the only unRESTful option would be a 404
without so much as a rel='home' in its <head>, i.e. no hypertext
provided for advancing application state.

Asking the user what to do isn't unRESTful, but I think you M2M guys
lose sight of that in pursuit of automation...

-Eric