Re: httpRange proposed text

/ Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> was heard to say:
| On Monday, July 29, 2002, at 06:17 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
|>
|> Joshua Allen wrote:
|>
|>> "If two people independently use the same URI as an identifier, they
|>> should be able to have a reasonable degree of confidence that they are
|>> identifying the same resource.  People should not be required to
|>> parse, dereference, or otherwise
|>> acquire any *additional* disambiguating information to provide this
|>> basic guarantee.  Resource naming practices should be considered
|>> carefully, and people are
|>> strongly discouraged from naming resources in a manner that
|>> unnecessarily weakens this guarantee."

This seems perfectly reasonable.

| Nicely put.
|
|> The intent seems good, but how on earth do you build this
|> confidence? By relying on the human-language semantics of the opaque
|> part of the URI?
|
| Absolutely not.  Joshua didn't mean that you knew what each URI meant
| by just looking at it -- he meant (I think/hope!) that you know from
| the architecture that the two occurrences of the URI will identify the
| same thing, whatever that is.  There is no ambiguity built into the
| architecture itself.  This is a core principle fo the Web which we
| seem to be in danger of forgetting.

It bothers me that you've apparently removed "reasonable degree of
confidence" from your explanation of Joshua's suggested text. Was that
accidental or intentional?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | Reason's last step is the recognition that
XML Standards Architect | there are an infinite number of things which
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | are beyond it.--Pascal

Received on Saturday, 3 August 2002 10:09:06 UTC