Re: RULE vs MGET

On Mar 10, 2004, at 15:17, ext Phil Dawes wrote:
>>
>> I appreciate your position. Adoption of URIQA is similar to adoption
>> of WebDAV. It requires the involvement of the web authority to a
>> greater or lesser degree.
>
> Which is to my mind a very compelling reason for it *not* to become
> the standard for something as important as information discovery on
> the semantic web. You can't use MGET with existing web infrastructure,
> and most people don't have the ability to change existing web
> infrastructure.
>
> In fact I'd speculate that probably > 99% of the web content in the
> world is maintained by people without the ability to change the
> infrastructure that serves it.
>
> When you add that to the likelyhood that the sum total of SW agents in
> the world probably currently numbers less than 100, I'd say that any
> spec with a real chance of succeeding must be biased towards adding
> complexity to the client in favour of modification of existing web
> infrastructure.
>

I appreciate your point of view, but I think you overexaggerate
the feasibility of adoption.

Users may not be competent to write a web server or web browser,
but they can choose one implementation over another, based on
which provides the most utility or ROI.

Furthermore, even though most folks mantaining the content of
the web do not understand the underlying infrastructure, they
tend to employ experts who do, and who allow them to focus on
the creation and management of content, not on the nuts-n-bolts
of how that's done.

Yet those of us who actually *do* deal with the nuts-n-bolts
of how that is done, and strive to make life easy and maximally
productive for those creating and maintaining content, care about
things such as genericity, scalability, modularity, flexibililty,
extensibility and all kinds of other 'ity's.

As far as the fundamental architecture is concerned (and that
*is* what is being discussed here, not just yet another web
application) the ability of a majority of end users (real end
users) to understand and deploy the technology is not a strongly
motivating concern, based on the (reasonable) presumption that
tools and applications used by the end users will insulate
them from the underlying technology and facilitate their
using it to their maximal benefit.

Finally, it is IMO simply poor engineering to overload clients
with functionality that is best deployed in an far more efficient
manner on a server (but then, given the nature of many of the
clients within the scope of my focus, such a view is perhaps
to be expected...)

Regards,

Patrick

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 07:48:17 UTC