- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 16:47:35 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- cc: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Joshua Allen wrote: > > There's a large class of http:-named resource for which the resource > can > > be exhaustively described by a content-typed bag of bytes. But there > are > > other resources (typically those that wrap databases, services etc) > for > > which we can never get a complete rendering of 'the thing itself', > only > > exchange messages with it. The document metaphor(*) seems too passive > a > > Let's just acknowledge that "HTTP URL is an endpoint for > message-passing" or more simply, "HTTP URL is just a switchboard", is > widely regarded as abuse of HTTP. Everyone admits that people abuse > POST this way, but most would agree that we should give people a better > way to do their "RPC and message passing". Abuse of POST hurts more > than just the semantic web. There are some things about the layering of SOAP-based RPC over HTTP that one might grumble about, but all that aside much the same argument can be run for 'classic' (CGI etc) Web services, ie. those that take a bunch of HTML-form POSTed parameters and return a (typically HTML or now XML) document. The Web wouldn't be what it is today without CGI, so we need a notion of http:-named 'document' that is at least broad enough to describe the things (CGI / web form endpoints, for lack of another name) that we've been POSTing our simple attribute/value messages to for all these years. Dan -- mailto:danbri@w3.org http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 16:47:39 UTC