Re: Historical - Re: Proposed IETF/W3C task force: "Resource meaning" Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Tim Berners-Lee<timbl@w3.org> wrote:
>
> On 2009-08 -04, at 00:57, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> There are a number of possible paths, as I see it:
>
> - Let the verbs be used however anyone wants to and have them lose
> any distinct meaning. As an example of the sort of direction this
> leads us in is one of the ways AWWSW tried to make sense of
> Information Resource, by calling it a "200 responder".  Circular, and
> not very informative.
> - Restrict the scope of things HTTP URIs can refer to, paring the
> possibilities to those sorts of things conceived of when HTTP was
> first created.  I get the sense that some in this forum would have it
> that way, but the direction the Semantic Web is going says otherwise.
> - Start introducing some distinctions into the specifications and
> therefore letting there be room again for the verbs to retain some
> meaning, albeit by perhaps saying that some of them can't be said
> about various sort of things, and that they may mean different things
> when applied to different sorts of things.
>
>
> The latter is what I propose, and really the way we went with HTTP-Range14
> and 303.  The TAG did it by talking about "Information Resource" as a
> subclass
> of "Resource", but I'm just thinking "document" (and service) as a subclass
> of "thing"
> will make better matches with the existing cognitive associations for
> typical engineers.

Yes, I recognize that. But given the conversation we're having I think
there's a lot more that has to be done. Scanning through the httpbis
draft still finds language plenty of language that is unfortunate, for
example:

    The "http" scheme is used to locate network resources via the HTTP  protocol

(it does more than locate network resources - it is used to get
information about any resources)

    "The action performed by the POST method might not result in a
resource that can be identified by a URI"

(any resource *can* be identified by a URI)

etc.

-Alan

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 12:59:51 UTC