Re: [xml-dev] RESTful operations on document fragments

["\"John L. Clark\"" <jlc6@po.cwru.edu>]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
> Just to note that I've posted a hopefully coherent blog entry on this
>  set of ideas:
>
>  <http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/02/addressing_fragments_in_rest_1.html>

One of your examples is the following URI:
<http://simonstl.com/book.xml?XML-XPTR=xpath1(//book/chapter/title)>,
which as you say "reference[s] all the chapter titles in a book".  An
interesting tie-in with the current XML 2.0 thread on this list is
that if you were to perform a GET on this URI, it would be nice to
have a format for the return value.  If we were to go with Norm
Walsh's 7th suggestion for XML 2.0[0], then we could just return all
the titles in a single (XML 2.0) document:

 <?xml version="2.0"?>
 <title>Title of first chapter</title>
 <!-- ... -->
 <title>Title of nth chapter</title>

One certainly does need to "be very careful with identifiers that
reference multiple fragments", but moving forward with XML could
provide a nice alignment with what you are trying to accomplish with
identifying a set of sub-resources.

Take care,

   John L. Clark

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