REST & types

> So here's a question. If I *wanted* type safety what do I do?

Type binding occurs very late in REST.  Do it with HEAD or GET (such
as invoking a GET and Accepting RDF).

> I'd be 
> most surprised if my dog (Japanese Chin FWIW) would respond to POST, 

POST it a representation of some food, and it gets fed.
POST it a representation of a hand, and it gets petted.
(logically, of course 8-)
etc..

A machine only knows that POST takes these actions if you know that the
URI is of rdf:type <some URI identifying dogs that is known a priori>.

> PUT, DELETE et al. Point being that you're really tunelling one 
> communication protocol over another *unless* the "generic" methods are 
> actually meaningful to the resource/application.
> 
> Note that Roy explicitly talks about REST for "distributed hypermedia" 
> not for "distributed computing" in the general sense.

Yup.  But everything that can be done by distributed computing can be
done by distributed hypermedia.  It's complete.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com