Re: The "web page" is the car

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 07:29:49PM -0500, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> No. They were created on different dates - for example.

Granted.

But while that's some interesting meta data about the resource, it's
not the kind of information that a client would use to determine what
it was dealing with; it's purely ancillary.  I expect that any other
information you could identify that differed between a car and a
conceptual work about a car, was the same.

In other words, if we had a set of representations of a car without
this metadata, and a set with it, a client should still be able to
expect that the resource is a car.  They'd just be confused to learn
that the creator of the car was "Fred" rather than "Ford".

Actually, I just thought of another problem with your model, as I
understand it.  How do you ever effect a state change in the real
world?  If URIs (with no fragids) only identify non-real things, how do
I use the Web to turn a lightbulb off?  If a lightbulb were identified
by the URI;

  http://example.org/lightbulb-web-page#bulb

Would a PUT to http://example.org/lightbulb-web-page of a document
with the "bulb" fragment set to "off" do this?  If not, how would
you do it?  If so, how does that differ from saving a Web page
about the lightbulb without the expectation that the save action
changes the state of a real bulb?

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis