Re: LDP would benefit from being RESTful

hello david.

On 2012-11-14 10:58 , David Booth wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 10:28 -0800, Erik Wilde wrote:
>> [ . . .  ] RDF isn't
>> RESTful it itself because it's not a hypermedia format.
> Huh?  I'm baffled by that comment.  Why do you say RDF is not a
> hypermedia format?   For one thing, RDF is composed almost entirely of
> URIs, i.e., links.  How much more link-ful can you get?

RDF is based on URIs as identifiers. while links always are identifiers, 
identifiers are not always links. unless you have a hypermedia format 
that tells you which identifier is a link, and why you might want to 
follow it.

> For another,
> *any* structured document format can be viewed as a serialization of
> RDF, because RDF is syntax independent.

pretty much any structured data format can be mapped into pretty much 
any other structured data format, but that really doesn't matter for the 
discussion of RDF not being a hypermedia format.

> Can you please explain what you
> mean by saying that RDF is not a hypermedia format?  Then what *is* a
> hypermedia format?

a hypermedia format is a format that provides interaction affordances as 
links, where the format itself represents the interaction affordance. 
HTML defines how to interact with img/@src and form/@action, because 
these are actionable links. HTML also defines that you shouldn't bother 
interacting with head/@profile, because it's intended to be an 
identifier, and not a link.

RDF just doesn't talk about those things. there's no way how RDF can 
tell a client that for ordering a book (or let's say "adding a 'ordered 
book' resource to the 'book orders' container", it needs to POST a 
certain representation (representing the book to be ordered) to a 
certain URI. it's just not something RDF can do.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Wednesday, 14 November 2012 19:29:53 UTC