Re: definitions for operations on URIs

At 11:30 AM 7/14/02 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
>At 12:53 PM 2002-07-13, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
> >http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jul/0169.html
> >
> >These look like interesting possible additions to the URI specification.
>
>Interesting, if one could tell what they meant.

Al,

I don't think the purpose of including these definitions would be to give 
complete instructions for URI handling in all situations, but to help all 
readers (and writers) of URI-related documents to be in broad agreement 
about the terms they use.

Hence:

> >URI Resolution:
> >  The process of determining the access mechanism and
> >  appropriate parameters necessary to dereference a
> >  URI. e.g. in the case of an HTTP URI, this process
> >  resolves the URI into an IP address, a port number,
> >  a host name (possibly optional) and a request URI.
> >
> >  Resolution may require several iterations.
>
>The access mechanism is not necessarily unique.
[...]

I don't think that harms the definition as given.


> >URI Dereference:
> >  The process of using the access mechanism and
> >  parameters generated by URI resolution to create,
> >  inspect or modify resource state.
>
>The nature of the desired operation may be implied
>by the URI itself or may be determined by the context
>in which the URI-reference is found.
[...]

Ditto.


> >URI Retrieval:
> >  The use of URI dereference to retrieve
> >  representations of resource state.
>
>This language is circular.  Retrieval is to retrieve.
>But what is that?

OK, I suggest:
[[
URI Retrieval:
   The use of URI dereference to obtain
   representations of resource state.
]]


>And the 'create' and 'modify' cases would seem to
>call for terms parallel to this 'inspect' version.

I think retrieval is a common enough case to deserve special mention.


>The whole discussion is unfortunately tainted with network
>communication residues.

Tainted?  The web is predicated on network communication, no?

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>