Re: FYI -- draft ietf uri doc

>RFC 2396 says: "A resource can be anything that has identity". Gee thats
>helpful in designing tools!  :-).

Maybe you are looking for something other than a resource.  That is the
only thing a tool needs to know in order to manipulate the Web interface:
the fact that it knows very little, and therefore must rely on the
naming authority for everything else.

>I think my point still stands:  
>"the answer to the question "what is a resource".  As the W3C RDF activity
>has found (in my opinion), it is no longer sufficient to gloss over this by
>saying "whatever you want".  It may indeed be necessary to allow it to be
>"whatever you want" but there must be  some constraints if we are to build
>useful tools to deal with resources: "whatever you want, but you say what it
>is as follows....so that we can design tools which will do the
>following...."

Resources exist without RDF.  It therefore follows that the claim of
"there must be constraints [along the lines of RDF]" is false.

I'm not saying that RDF isn't useful.  It just isn't necessary and has
nothing to do with the definition of "what is a resource".  Now, if you
want to rephrase the question to be a request of "describe the semantics
that define this particular resource, using a defined data format for
that purpose", then the answer might be RDF.  But it sounds more like
you want something that lets the origin server tell the client how the
representations within a server are mapped to the resources.  Good luck.

I can think of hundreds of standards, pseudo-standards, and proprietary
protocols that might fit within a metaspec that tried to gather together
all that is related to URI.  Yet another reason why it is a bad idea
to even try.  However, I believe Leslie means to cover only those URI
things that are governed by RFCs, which at least is a tractable problem
(even though it was the same problem that sidetracked the old URI WG for
over three years).

....Roy

Received on Monday, 4 September 2000 05:49:50 UTC