Re: Private naming conventions and hypermedia (was Re: Draft minutes from TAG telcon of 2008-07-24

On 7/25/08, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) <skw@hp.com> wrote:
>
>
> David, Mark,
>
> I think that I understand "hypermedia as the enegine of application state"
> as a concept, however both of you seem to indicate that there is some rule
> here that stands to be broken. Could eiether of you state crisply what that
> rule is? I've had a quick look in the oracle.. and have come up empty.

Let's use an example.  From http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/ark/ ;

  In a web browser, for example, if you enter

      http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf5p30086k?

  it returns a brief machine- and eye-readable metadata record, such as [...]

So if I've got an AWK-aware agent that is in the state "Looking at
representation of http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf5p30086k", and
that agent knows it need only append "?" to that URI and dereference
it to take it to a new state in the application state machine where it
can view a representation of a metadata record about that other
resource, then that is a state transition that didn't use hypermedia.
A hypermedia approach would have explicitly declared the "?" URI in
the former representation with some link metadata called
"metadata-record" or some such, e.g. <a rel="metadata" href="?" />

Make sense?

Mark.