RE: Are generic resources intentional?

David,

I think the point of Alan's question is not so much about whether the file (and hence its representations) can be subject to change, but about whether its is the file itself[*] that is the responding entity or the thing (filing system) that acts as its container.

Stuart
--



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Booth [mailto:david@dbooth.org] 
> Sent: 10 June 2009 11:02
> To: Alan Ruttenberg
> Cc: Pat Hayes; Jonathan Rees; noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com; 
> AWWSW TF; Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)
> Subject: Re: Are generic resources intentional?
> 
> On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 22:45 +0100, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> > > Why not, "can emit a response to some kind of access 
> protocol"  ? That seems
> > > to handle all the present and all the likely future 
> cases, be unambiguous,
> > > and (by philosophical standards) vividly clear and 
> unambiguous. And it has
> > > the great merit of talking about the **actual resource** 
> rather than an
> > > awww:representation of it, which (latter) is what gets 
> conveyed in messages,
> > > in fact.
> > 
> > What does  "can emit a response to some kind of access 
> protocol"  the answer to?
> > Notably, it doesn't include things like text files with 
> html in them.
> 
> Sure it can.  If you think of these things as functions from time and
> requests to representations then its representations still may change
> over time (as the file is modified) even if at any given time 
> it always
> emits the same representation regardless of the request.  Or, if you
> take Roy's "curried" view (see
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-awwsw/2008Apr/0047.html )
> of these things being functions from time to representation sets, then
> even if the representation set is a singleton set at a given time it
> still may be a different singleton set at another time, when 
> the file is
> modified.
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> Cleveland Clinic (contractor)
> 
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not 
> necessarily
> reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 12:52:10 UTC