Temporally extended sessions

Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
>...
> 
>    [Ian]
>           TB: If your protocol needs a notion of a temporally extended
>           session, then HTTP won't help you.
>           DO rhetorically: Why would you need one of those? You'll need
>           to include some examples.

I think that in most cases there is virtue in making temporally extended 
sessions into URI-addressable, HTTP-retrievable resources. HTTP does not 
itself have a notion of temporally extended session, but neither does it 
have a notion of "map" or "auction" and yet it delivers representations 
of resources of those types. I don't dispute that HTTP has limitations. 
But I think that there is a lot of "shortcut thinking" when it comes to 
enumerating those limitations. "HTTP doesn't have X as a first-class 
concept therefore HTTP is not appropriate for X." That needs to be 
demonstrated, not asserted.

  Paul Prescod