- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:34:33 -0400
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: "public-awwsw@w3.org" <public-awwsw@w3.org>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
Jonathan Rees wrote: > I might have talked about servers, but was discouraged from > doing so by Stuart and Noah. It was not my intention to discourage you from talking about servers, though I'm not yet convinced that they're an important abstraction in telling the basic HTTP story. Maybe they are. I was discouraging the introduction of the term "endpoint", which I understood (perhaps incorrectly) to be an abstraction for something that's not quite the server or the resource, but is also persistent in the sense that, unlike representation, it exists outside the context of one particular HTTP interaction. > An IR defined to be one whose awww:representations convey the > declaration of US independence isn't real in the same way since > it would have those > awww:representations regardless of what happened on the web. I'm not quite sure that the representations follow directly from the fact that the resource is the Declaration of Independence, but if there's an abstraction missing in the story I'm inclined to think that it may be the "assignment authority" or if you like the "owner" of the resource. Let's say that I, Noah, have registered noahmendelsohn.com (I have) and that I choose to assign the URI http://noahmendelsohn.com/declarationofindependence. I decide that the IR that I choose for this to represent is the text of the Declaration of Independence, including the lexical distinction of the front matter, the paragraphs, the signatures and so on. I think I still have some freedom to decide which of the many (actually infinite) number representations of this information I will chose to serve. For example, I could use large fonts or small, or a different type face. I could send a text/html document and/or text/plain, etc. All that's required is that the receiver be able to answer to come to agreement with me on the aspects of the representation I care about. Crucially, it's not in general possible for a user retrieving a representation to determine whether the font size, for example, is something that I consider fundamental to the information content of the resource, or just an artifact of the representation I have chosen. We can either model that by saying )a)that the resource is just the declaration, and that the particular representations served are determined by the responsible authority or (b) we can say that the resource is not in fact the Declaration in the abstract, but rather the particular representations, including choice of media types font specifications, etc. Either way, I don't find "server" or "endpoint" to be the missing abstraction; "resource authority" or if you prefer "assignment authority" might be something we have to talk about. If the authority chooses to use the mechanisms of some server software to create or choose the representations, so be it, but that's valid only because he/she chooses to delegate that responsibility. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 22:34:17 UTC