RE: http-range-14: Suggestions or silence

-1
 
The first sentence is where things go wrong.  URIs on the WWW have never been context-dependent, and never will be.
 

 -----Original Message----- 
 From: Miles Sabin [mailto:miles@milessabin.com] 
 Sent: Mon 8/5/2002 2:42 AM 
 To: WWW-Tag 
 Cc: 
 Subject: Re: http-range-14: Suggestions or silence
 
 


 OK, taking http://www.textuality.com/tag/s1.1.html as the starting
 point, this would be my suggestion for a replacement for the first
 para,
 
   URIs are context dependent identifiers. Typically the context of their
   use will be shared and implicit, in which case URIs may be treated as
   if context independent. This cannot, however, be guaranteed in
   general. In cases where ambiguity is possible and would be harmful,
   mechanisms which allow independent agents to eliminate ambiguity and
   coordinate their uses of URIs should be provided. Explicit discussion
   of all the possible contexts of URI use is out of scope for this
   document.
 
   Whilst not the only framework for the interpretation of URIs, the REST
   architecture merits particular attention because of its close
   connection with the underlying protocols and infrastructure of the
   web. In REST a URI unambiguously identifies a Resource, an abstraction
   for which there is a conceptual mapping to a (possibly empty) set of
   representations. The representations of a resource may vary as a
   function of factors including time, place, and the identity of the
   agent accessing the resource. For example, at the time this document
   was drafted, the URI http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/MXOA0069.html
   identified a REST Resource corresponding to Yahoo's weather forecast
   for Oaxaca, Mexico. The representations of this Resource depends on
   (at least) time, the expressed preference of the user for Fahrenheit
   or Celsius, and the identity of the user-agent software receiving the
   representation.
 
   The unambiguity of URIs in the REST framework makes it suitable for
   reasoning about certain classes of automated and semi-automated
   processing, particularly in cases where either the publisher of a URI
   is accepted as authoritative or where there is some generally
   accepted third-party authority. It should be noted, however, that
   there are cases where these conditions cannot be met and hence
   where the REST framework of URI interpretation might be inappropriate.
   RDF, for example, allows weakly coordinated yet interacting agents to
   make assertions using URIs as identifiers. Here there might not be an
   authority able to practically rule whether the intended referent of a
   given use of, for example, http://www.w3.org/, is a particular
   document or a particular web-site, in which case independent
   assertions made using that URI might not be directly compatible. In
   these circumstances agents should be provided with sufficient
   additional contextual information or disambiguating mechanisms to
   eliminate any harmful consequences in practice.
 
 Cheers,
 
 
 Miles

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 11:21:37 UTC