httpRange-14 archeology

I tracked down what seems to be the earliest TAG discussion on the
issue on record:

   http://www.w3.org/2002/03/18-tagmem-irc.html

and Tim's followup

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Mar/0092.html

(which I personally still think is the better engineering choice).

As far as I can tell, no new insights have surfaced since then.

What I don't know is how, given resistance from Dan, Roy, Stuart, and
other TAG members, Tim managed to convince them in the end to vote in
favor of the 2005 resolution. I will need to do some more digging.

One thing did get cleared up for me: The name of the issue, "the range
of the HTTP dereference function", which always seemed ridiculous to
me to the point that I've been tempted to change it in the issue
tracker, was chose by Tim for this email as propaganda: Of course the
range can't include cars. And Dan's rejoinder that no one ever said
you were supposed to get the car, you get a 'representation' of it,
has been repeated hundreds of times since.

Maybe Tim's tactical error was to fail to assert that the resource and
its representation were *the same kind of thing* in the way that my
representation in Congress is a person just like me. In other words,
instead of putting up a huge wall between resource and representation
going from the 1989 'fixed resource' web to the 2002 'generic
resource' web, just put up the weakest possible wall, one that would
rise only when necessary to maintain consistency.

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 21 February 2011 15:08:54 UTC