Re: Valid representations, canonical representations, and what the SW needs from the Web... from Walden Mathews on 2003-02-03 (www-tag@w3.org from February 2003)

From: Walden Mathews <waldenm@optonline.net>
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 23:05:37 -0500
To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@apache.org>
Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Message-id: <004d01c2cb39$82ac4ea0$1702a8c0@WorkGroup>

> > My other question has to do with the "HTML rendition" part
> > of the reply.  If URIs can identify anything, not just documents,
> > why wouldn't you guess that the above URI identifies section 10
> > of RFC 2616 directly, instead of an HTML rendition of same?
> 
> Because URIs are not opaque to humans.

Resources which are representations seem to be among the
most confusing critters in the REST world.  If you have a resource
that is "the HTML document that describes X", may it be
identical with its representation dished up on GET, or is the
bunch of bits that represent "the HTML document..." somehow
still a shade different from the resource in this case. Kind of
like 1/8th of a dimension away?  More like an infinite number
of levels of abstraction.(?)

What is your view?

Thanks,

Walden

PS - sorry if this has been asked/answered before

Received on Sunday, 2 February 2003 23:05:46 UTC