Support for content-negotiation

[paulmillar]

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In general, I'm quite happy with the GitHub Pages service that is offered. That said, one specific pain-point is the (seemingly) lack of HTTP content-negotiation.

Although I didn't find a concrete statement, the documentation states that dynamic content isn't supported by GitHub Pages and I'm assuming that this term includes content-negotiation.

My particular use-case involves semantic content (an ontology) with a specific IRI that (through purl.org) resolves to a particular web page hosted by GitHub. Currently, this shows the HTML documentation for that ontology, but it would be useful if the client could use content-negotiation to fetch the underlying ontology. This is a relatively common paradigm in this field.

I understand the lack of dynamic content (i.e., running code to generate content); however, one common approach involves the web server offering static content, but the client can influence that choice not only by the request path, but also the Accept header (i.e., content negotiation). For a comparison, see support in the Apache httpd server for content-negotiation.

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[paulmillar]

Some further resourcesn that advocate the use of content negotiation:

• W3c's Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies.
• The paper Best Practices for Implementing FAIR Vocabularies and Ontologies on the Web (see section 4.1).
• How to (properly) publish a vocabulary or ontology in the web , particularly part 4

[jfullstackdev]

if I get it correctly, your asking a backend functionality ?

well, GitHub Pages started so that documentation can be hosted right here on GitHub, then it became so famous that too many add ons are requested, including that backend functionality but I guess up to now, there is no official roadmap

what I can suggest is AWS EC2, it's actually the standard for deployment of full stack apps or even AWS Amplify, but in terms of preparation, it's kind of you need to learn some config, AWS Amplify is with out of the box but AWS EC2 being flexible but more of like you are using a Linux machine but on the cloud to deploy your site

[paulmillar]

Yes, I'm talking about the capability of the GitHub Service, as exposed to the users. The current service is (from my understanding) not sufficient to allow the publishing of ontologies according to best practices, because it doesn't support HTTP content negotiation.

What you say about the the challenges of having a successful service certainly makes sense. I can easily imagine people will try to use GitHub Pages outside of its original use-case, and request "small" changes when they hit limits. My request is certainly rather similar to this model.

Thanks for your suggestions involving AWS. As it happens, I think we would have several hosting options within our academic community; however, the information is useful more generally.

For us, we're evaluating the impact of deviating from best practices, compared to the effort in moving to a different platform. Within this context, I felt it would be good to just mention that this discussion is taking place, as feedback on GitHub Pages.