Distinguish between requesting HTML Partial and Full Layout for same URL / Route

At the moment I am writing the routing code for my MVC framework which is capable of rendering HTML partials (views). These partials can be loaded server-side or client-side (using Mootools HTML request). The layout of every page is then build from multiple partials. As I want it to be ReST compliant, each HTML partial (view) maps to an URL in a defined URL space, as follows (indentation shows the intended document structure):

...
/      
  /navigation
  /content
    /profile
      /profile/1
        /profile/1/message/
          /profile/1/message/1
          /profile/1/message/2
...

Now the problem is that I want people to be able to visit "/profile" and then not being show开发者_开发知识库n the HTML partial, but instead the full layout. I was thinking about the following:

1) Creating a separate namespace / prefix in the URL for partials, for example:

• /profile for the full layout
• /partial/profile for the partial

2) Sending a custom HTTP header to request for a partial or no custom HTTP header to request for the full layout.

The first option would be more ReST compliant (cache friendly), but I am still unsure (and that is the real problem) about other options that might still be unknown to me.

Before I start implementing one of the above solutions, I've got the following questions:

1. What alternatives do I have to distinguish between requesting partials and full layouts?
2. What are the best practices to keep the client-side state / context of each partial?

When you request client-side, the server will receive the extra header HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH with the value xmlhttprequest.

if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && 
   strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest') {
   ....
}

This is a reliable header to test for, rather than add a custom type.

Option 1 is definitely a better solution that option 2. In a RESTful system we create new resources all the time to make up for the lack of methods.

Creating a custom header is a really bad idea.