- From: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:37:11 -0500
- To: "Bernard Vatant" <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>, "Miles, AJ (Alistair)" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>, "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: "SWBPD list" <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
Bernard, > Indirect identification in [4], is followed by section 2.3 > "URI comparisons" ... > http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#identifiers-comparison > ... starting this way: "URIs that are identical, > character-by-character, refer to the same resource." > > But previous section clearly states that the same URI can > refer "indirectly" to different things in different > (so-called local) processing contexts. So maybe this sentence > should read more exactly : > > "URIs that are identical, character-by-character, refer to > the same resource in the same processing context." > > We tend to focus on the most frequent processing context, the > Web client-server interaction which aims to retrieve a > representation of the resource. But, Alistair, all the VM > cookbook shows clearly that the representation that you > retrieve in this specific processing context (http GET) > depends on devilish details of both client and server > configuration, so even in this case where the resource is > supposed to be "directly" referenced, actually the referent > is not uniquely defined by the URI. Your overall point may be correct -- I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out! -- but what you've stated above seems to fly in the face of RFC 3986[8] (the definition of URIs). RFC 3986 is very clear that a URI identifies a resource as a whole -- not a specific representation of that resource. The idea that it may be okay for a URI to have multiple referents also seems to conflict fundamentally with the principle that "By design, a URI identifies one resource"[8] (regardless of context). If there really is no conflict between these views, then I think the community as a whole is badly in need of greater education to understand why not. I know I am! [4] WebArch on URI collision: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#URI-collision [7] RFC 3986: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt [8] WebArch on indirect identification: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#indirect-identification David Booth
Received on Monday, 30 January 2006 18:42:36 UTC