Re: Uniform access to descriptions

Pat Hayes wrote:
> At 5:54 PM +0100 4/8/08, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
>> Stuart,
>>> Wrt to that resolution... a 303 response means *nothing*... if you 
>>> happen to follow the redirection and find something useful about the 
>>> thing you originally inquired of, that you trust and are prepared to 
>>> stick in your reasoning engine, then you win - if not, of itself, 
>>> the redirection has told you nothing/means nothing.
>>>
>>> 200 tells you that the response convey as representation of the 
>>> (state of?) referenced thing.
>>>  
>> If this is what TAG accepts, i..e, 200=*representation of* as oppose 
>> to "resource of".  I have no problem and would be happy with it.  My 
>> perception is that TAG is recommending either explicitly or 
>> implicitly the latter viewpoint.
>
> Gentlemen, please both of you speak very slowly and carefully at this 
> point, as a precise understanding here is critical.
>
> Stuart, did you mean that the response conveys/ a/ representation/ in 
> the webarch sense/ of the referenced thing? It would be helpful if 
> every time the word 'represent' and its cognates are used in this very 
> special sense, such usage were explicitly flagged, as it can very 
> quickly lead to incomprehension when understood more broadly (as it is 
> almost everywhere else in the English-speaking world.)
>
> (Xiaoshu: from which it follows that in this case, the referenced 
> thing in question must be something that/ has/ a 
> webarch-representation; so, in this case, it/ cannot/ be some other 
> kind of thing that cannot, by virtue of its very nature, have such a 
> (webarch-)representation; so, to refer to such things - such, as we 
> now might say,/ non-information resource things/ - requires something 
> other than a 200 response. Thus goes the http-range-14 logic, as I 
> understand it. Note that in order to follow this, all we need to know 
> is that there are things which (a) cannot have a representation in the 
> webarch sense but (b) that we might wish to refer to with a URI. Their 
> exact nature need not be specified, but I believe that the language of 
> 'information resource' boils down to  an attempt to characterize this 
> category of [/things that cannot be webarch-represented by a byte 
> stream/]. And, centrally important, not having a representation in the 
> webarch sense does/ not/ mean not having any kind of representation, 
> being unrepresentable, or not being describable. The webarch sense of 
> 'representation' is very specialized and narrow.)
Pat, as I have detailed argued here 
http://dfdf.inesc-id.pt/tr/web-arch.  There can have only one consistent 
interpretation, that is: there is no so-called "information resource".  
In this sense, any HTML page is abstract with respect to the web.  What 
is concrete to the web is the "representation" of the resource.

Or we can take TBL's viewpoint.  To make all slash URI as an information 
resource.  This again gives IR a syntactic definition, which is O.K. and 
usable.  But the reality that many hash URI are used in a way that will 
make TBL's position difficult to accept.

I don't mind either way but I do mind the current way, which offers no 
help but only create confusion.

Xiaoshu

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 18:55:18 UTC