Re: I-D: How Roy would Implement URNs and URCs Today

In message <9507182200.AA17553@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu>, Daniel LaLiberte writes:

>  > An expression is obtained only when the URL is combined with an
>  > Action (aka Method) like GET.  If you change the action (e.g., PUT),
>  > the expression changes, but not the URL.
> 
> There is an implicit GET that goes along with most URL resolution, and
> we agree that the combination is an expression. 

Currently most do, yes, but that happens to be because GET is
virtually all that browsers do at the moment. I hope to see a lot more
methods being created and used, from revision control to annotations.

Then we do need names for resources to perform these methods on.

> In fact, we need a way to represent the full combination of the
> method, the URL, and any additional parameters that were used in
> resolving to the result, if that is what is being done.  This full
> expression would be useful in identifying the result for caching
> purposes, for example.

This expression is probably the HTTP Request header. Note this can
potentially be quite big...

I'm not sure it can ever be more than a guess. Already you have
services keying the displayed results on other meta data such as
User-agent. Note sure how desirable this is, but there you are.

At the end of the day a request is handled by a protocol transaction
between client and server. Even an identical request might be handled
differently coming from different IP addresses. You can't shoe-horn
that into an identifier.

>  > Identity and behavior are two orthogonal issues, and they must be
>  > kept separate.  If an identifier implies behavior, then the resource
>  > cannot be referenced independent of the desired action.
> 
> It's not so simple.  An identifier that implies absolutely nothing
> would be useless - you would have no way to interpret it to find out
> what it refers to.

Sure, but you have implications: is a URL starts http://server/ I know I can
use HTTP to that server do whatever I want.

Putting actions into resource identifiers sounds like a bad thing for
the general case, IMHO...

-- Martijn
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Received on Wednesday, 19 July 1995 01:55:42 UTC