Re: httpRange proposed text

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 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."

>> 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.

Indeed, I mis-parsed Joshua's point, but I come back with the same 
question:  How do you get this kind of confidence?  Joshua suggests that 
the answer has to do with how you go about naming resources.  I don't 
get it; further explanation please? -Tim

Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 22:18:02 UTC