- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 15:43:44 -0400
- To: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- cc: www-tag@w3.org
> representation of = something which portrays a resource; most often
> in the arch doc a bag of bits with a MIME type and other metadata,
That is: an expression in some identified language, a message with
meaning. Bits + MIME Type == bits (raw information) + language
identifier (indicating, by reference, the syntax and semantics of the
language). Sounds good. In practice there's a kind of language
layering and combining going on, with markup languages and header
fields, but that can probably be ignored at this distance.
But the important question is this: what is this "portrays"
relationship between the resource and the representation. So far
people have suggested that the respresentation:
1. entirely communicates all that is knowable about the resource
(easy for OOP systems; I think this is REST's answer)
2. communicates enough information about the resource to uniquely
identify it in the universe, and also tell you some useful stuff
about it
3. conveys "a lot" about the resource, most of the stuff a typical
user would want to know
(probably the typical web answer)
4. conveys some information probably related to the resource
(the usual RDF answer)
5. there is no relationship in general.... :-)
This is where the challenge is.
-- sandro
Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 15:43:49 UTC