- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 15:08:07 -0700
- To: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Cc: jschroeder@becomsys.de, http-wg@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>>> Nope, that's backwards. Each possible entity from a resource is >>> a "representation" of that resource at the time the message originated. > >The best way to think of an entity, in my opinion, is to consider it >to be a _copy_ of a representation which was made at some time. A >representation exists internally in a server. An entity exists in a >HTTP response (or request). The representation is the information you get when the entity is extracted from the HTTP message -- it is the data transferred, not the internal machine representation on the server. >>> A representation is a variant if, at origination time, the set of >>> possible representations has a membership greater than one. > >No, this is not how the 1.1 spec defines it. I would say that in 1.1, >'representation' and 'variant' are synonymous terms. A cut-and-paste >of the definition: > > variant > A resource may have one, or more than one, representation(s) > associated with it at any given instant. Each of these > representations is termed a `variant.' Use of the term `variant' > does not necessarily imply that the resource is subject to > content negotiation. > >All this means that the term 'variant' is not very useful when >defining details of content negotiation. No, it means the definition in the spec is wrong, as I said a couple hundred times in our teleconferences. You cannot make a wrong thing right just because I was outvoted. These are terms defined by the architectural model of the Web, not defined by HTTP. ....Roy
Received on Saturday, 10 April 1999 15:15:14 UTC