Re: Valid representations, canonical representations, and what the SW needs from the Web...

Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:

> 
> Or far better, 
> 
> GET  http://www.prescod.net gives you a representation of a resource
> MGET http://www.prescod.net gives you knowledge of a resource

I'm not sure that this is far better - making a separation between 
'resource knowledge' and 'resource snapshot' seems somewhat arbitrary.


> To date, the primary suggestions have centered around treating
> knowledge about resources as representations of those resources,
> which I consider to be the crux of the problem.
> 
> Once you keep knowlege and representations disjunct, and realize
> that the Web cares about representations and the SW about knowledge,
> and both needs can be provided by the same essential architecture
> as it (almost) stands (HTTP) but requiring adjustments to maintain that
> crucial distinction between representation and knowledge (GET vs.
> MGET, etc.) then all is well, and both the Web and SW can agree
> about resources and URIs and that URIs denote resources, etc.
> and the Web can concern itself with representations without troubling
> about knowledge and the SW can concern itself with knowledge
> without troubling about representations, and URIs tie the two
> together quite nicely, consistently, and without conflict or
> ambiguity.
> 
> Problem solved.

Still not convinced there is an architecture/protocol problem (there 
may be an engineering/programming problem). As well as all that, 
there is as I said before, the whole matter of seeing an MGET method 
deployed - difficult, imo. Creating new verbs is not cheap, which is 
why there are so few of them in HTTP. I would rather see HEAD 
enriched to provide resource directed information, assuming the HTTP 
experts here don't see it as abuse.

Bill de hÓra