A few months back I threw out a question on Twitter: what breaks
on the web if we use status code 200 instead of 303 for our
Linked Data? I saw a resurgence of this on Twitter today which
prompted me to finally write up my thoughts in a medium with
more than 140 character soundbites. For those new to this debate
the current practice in the Linked Data community is to divide
the world into two classes: things that are definitely
“Information Resources” and things that might be information
resources or might be something else entirely, like a planet or
a toucan. I have written on the subject of information resources
before (such as what are information resources good for and 303
Asymmetry). Simplistically information resources can be
considered to be electronic documents such as web pages,
spreadsheets, images and the like. The only way to tell for sure
whether a URI denotes an information resource is to dereference
it. If you get a status code of 200 then the URI denotes an
information resource. No meaning is