ISSUE-81 (resource vs representation)

Hi,

(see also <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/81> and 
<http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7687>)

This issue is about the question vs "resource" is the thing identified 
by a URI/URL, or the bag of bits you get when fetching it (for HTTP, for 
instance, using GET).

Obviously, it can't be both for several reasons. The most obvious one 
that many resources [sic] are content-negotiated, so the bag of bits 
that a UA can fetch will depend on more than the request URI (such as 
request headers, point of time, or IP address).

On the other hand, Ian writes:

> RFC2616 is the one unnecessarily introducing new terminology here. A resource
> is a bag of bits, and HTML5 consistently uses that term throughout.

(<http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7687#c1>)

That is incorrect in itself, as there are parts of HTML5 which *do* use 
the traditional definition:

"A URL is a string used to identify a resource." -- HTML5, Section 
2.5.1, <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#terminology-0> (the 
fragid may be instable...)


Best regards, Julian

Received on Sunday, 27 September 2009 09:13:25 UTC