Re: ERB call on addressing

On Mar 25,  8:01pm, Jon Bosak wrote:
> Subject: Re: ERB call on addressing
> [Gavin Nicol:]
>
> | >@xmlToc is the name of a script that generates the XML TOC for the
> | >book named ADVOSUG.  If the choice is between address and query, it's
> | >a query.
> |
> | You *know* this is a script, the browser doesn't. To a browser,
> | this is an address that returns a resource.
>
> Then I'm not sure what "query" means any more.  How does the stuff
> generated by @xmlToc differ in principle from something a database
> might generate in response to a SQL query?  Is that an address, too?
>

What this means is that all HTTP requests are really queries of some sort,
although some queries are more obvious than others.  Servers may try to give
the impression of a distributed name space, but after all, any request to a
server may result in an arbitrary amount of computation to determine the
material actually returned.

After perusing this thread a bit, I think Gavin's right that we need to
distinguish this from just query syntax, but for the sake of the client not the
server.  If we consider the Xptr as a query, then we always need to go back to
the server.  If we consider it as an address, then a client can use a cached
document to resolve it.  It could also be construed as an implicit agreement
with the server that whatever comes back has a fairly stable existence.

Also, as current servers don't support this, there's no reason we can't be
ahead of the curve on suggesting a new syntax.

Matthew Fuchs
matt@wdi.disney.com

--

Received on Thursday, 27 March 1997 13:01:28 UTC