Re: NIR SIDETRACK Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

On Thu, 2012-03-29 at 01:37 +0100, Norman Gray wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Thus as it stands, the term 'information resource' in [1] has no
> implication (beyond incidentally reiterating that the 200-retrieved
> content is a (REST) representation of the resource).
> 
> However, the point of introducing the term is, I've always taken it,
> that it licenses the client to jump to some conclusions.  These
> conclusions aren't spelled out anywhere, but (unless you're being
> whimsical) they're things like 'this is a document', or 'this is a
> network thing', or 'this is not a squawking macaw which will squeeze
> out of the ethernet port and crap on my keyboard'.  What those
> conclusions materialise as in practice surely _depends on the
> application_ which is processing the resource.

Exactly.  And that is precisely why the UDDP Proposal use the term
"information resource" but explicitly leaves its definition
unconstrained:
http://www.w3.org/wiki/UriDefinitionDiscoveryProtocol#2.7_Information_resource
As I mentioned elsewhere, the term is not needed, and could be
eliminated entirely.  But it does provide a convenience for applications
that wish to make additional assumptions based on an HTTP 200 response.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2012 17:23:18 UTC