Re: Gloss standard terminology for resource/representation (ISSUE-81 Change Proposal)

On Tue, 6 Apr 2010, Dan Connolly wrote:
> > 
> > I believe that mentioning such differences will increase the level of 
> > confusion, not reduce it, because few people are familiar with the way 
> > HTTP uses these terms.
> 
> Few relative to the population of the planet, yes... even relative to 
> the web development community as a whole perhaps. But relative to the 
> intended audience of this spec, especially sections such as the one on 
> Application caches, I believe they are a critical constituency, if not 
> the majority.

The two major target audiences of the HTML spec are Web developers and 
browser vendors. In my experience the majority of both of these 
constituencies get confused when people start talking about abstract 
resources and resources having multiple representations. I'm certainly 
happy to hear from members of either group who would be less confused by 
the spec talking about "resource representations" than the status quo; if 
there are indeed such people, then I'd want to change the spec to help them.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 6 April 2010 22:30:21 UTC