Re: Harvesting from Roy's paper

Blog post including this material:
http://odontomachus.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/are-you-confused-yet-about-the-word-representation/

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org> wrote:
> Roy T. Fielding and Richard N. Taylor.
> Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture.
> ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), 2002.
> http://www.isr.uci.edu/~taylor/documents/2002-REST-TOIT.pdf
>
> ... allowing a user to progress through the application by selecting a
> link or submitting a short data-entry form, with each action resulting
> in a transition to the next state of the application by transferring a
> representation of that state to the user.
>
>    [A representation is of a state.]
>
> REST components communicate by transferring a representation of the
> data ...
>
>    [A representation is of data.]
>
> Finally, it allows an author to reference the concept rather than some
> singular representation of that concept, thus removing the need to
> change all existing links whenever the representation changes.
>
>    [A representation is of a concept.]
>
> Depending on the message control data, a given representation may
> indicate the current state of the requested resource, the desired
> state for the requested resource, or the value of some other resource,
> such as a representation of the input data within a client’s query
> form, or a representation of some error condition for a response.
>
>    [A representation *indicates* a state.]
>
> ... the specification of Web addresses also defines the scope and semantics
> of what we mean by resource, which has changed since the early Web
> architecture. REST was used to define the term resource for the URI
> standard [Berners-Lee et al. 1998], as well as the overall semantics
> of the generic interface for manipulating resources via their
> representations.
>
>    [A resource can be manipulated via a machine interface.]
>
> A resource does not always map to a singular file, but all resources
> that are not static are derived from some other resources, and by
> following the derivation tree an author can eventually find *all of the
> source resources that must be edited* in order to modify the
> representation of a resource.  [emphasis JAR's]
>
>    [A resource is derived from editable sources.]
>
> Semantics are a byproduct of the act of
> assigning resource identifiers and populating those resources with
> representations. At no time whatsoever do the server or client
> software need to know or understand the meaning of a URI—they merely
> act as a conduit through which the creator of a resource (a human
> naming authority) can associate representations with the semantics
> identified by the URI. In other words, *there are no resources on the
> server*; just mechanisms that supply answers across an abstract
> interface defined by resources.  [emphasis JAR's]
>
>    [Resources do not reside on servers.]
>

Received on Monday, 7 March 2011 14:17:11 UTC