[Bug 8264] Fix terminology for "resource", "representation", "retrieval"

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8264


Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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           Keywords|                            |NE




--- Comment #1 from Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>  2009-11-12 05:17:44 ---
quoting Larry Masinter:
> To understand the web, a reader will need to be familiar with other documents
> which establish terminology that this specification disagrees with. The
> documents describing URIs and HTTP are not just "authoritative documents", 
> they're the actual documents that are also necessary to read and understand how
> the web works. Defining and using different and inconsistent terminology is
> very confusing, and leads to the specification being unclear about essential
> processes. The result is also at odds with reality (since some resources have
> no representation and content-negotiated resources may have many). 
> 
>  RFC 3986 section 1.2.2 gives an overview of the relationship between
> "resource" and "representation" as well as "retrieval".
> 
>    When URIs are used within information retrieval systems to identify
>    sources of information, the most common form of URI dereference is
>    "retrieval": making use of a URI in order to retrieve a
>    representation of its associated resource.  A "representation" is a
>    sequence of octets, along with representation metadata describing
>    those octets, that constitutes a record of the state of the resource
>    at the time when the representation is generated.  Retrieval is
>    achieved by a process that might include using the URI as a cache key
>    to check for a locally cached representation, resolution of the URI
>    to determine an appropriate access mechanism (if any), and
>    dereference of the URI for the sake of applying a retrieval
>    operation.  Depending on the protocols used to perform the retrieval,
>    additional information might be supplied about the resource (resource
>    metadata) and its relation to other resources.
> 
> This terminology is used and expanded in
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging. 
> 
> 
> CHANGE PROPOSAL:
> 
> The editorial changes are, unfortunately, extensive, and will require looking
> at every use of "resource" and "file", as well as "fetch" and "fetching". 
> 
> To start with section 2.1, "resources", change this to reference RFC 3986 and
> define "resources, representations, and retrieval". 
> 
> Align the definitions with the HTTP specification.
> 
> (there are other definitions which also need alignment, including MIME type,
> content type; do those need separate bug reports?)
> 

[no comment; just repeating description in order to get it echoed to
public-html]


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Received on Thursday, 12 November 2009 05:17:54 UTC