Re: RFC2396bis wording, opinions?

Being minimalist just means that everyone gets to define it their
own way, which is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with
interoperability and doesn't imply one distinction by absence
of others.  As such, I think the following wording is less likely
to cause me additional work in the future, because it doesn't
remove all of the examples which were explicitly requested by
prior reviewers to avoid the assumption that their absence meant
they were excluded from the definition.

    Resource
       This document doesn't limit the scope of what might be a resource;
       rather, the term "resource" is used in a general sense for 
whatever
       might be assigned a URI for the sake of later identification.
       Familiar examples include an electronic document, an image, a
       service (e.g., "today's weather report for Los Angeles"), and a
       collection of other resources. A resource is not necessarily
       accessible via the Internet; e.g., human beings, corporations, and
       bound books in a library can also be resources. Likewise, abstract
       concepts can be resources, such as the operators and operands of a
       mathematical equation, the types of a relationship (e.g., "parent"
       or "employee"), or numeric values (e.g., zero, one, and infinity).

Since this also seems to be a frequent point of confusion, I will repeat
what we mean by identifier and identification, as is already present
in draft 05:

    Identifier
       An identifier embodies the information required to distinguish
       what is being identified from all other things within its scope of
       identification. Our use of the terms "identify" and "identifying"
       refer to this process of distinguishing from many to one; they
       should not be mistaken as an assumption that the identifier
       defines the identity of what is referenced, though that may be the
       case for some identifiers.

This is my interpretation of the input received so far, taking into
account both the current discussion and the others that preceded it.
If you feel that the above text does not provide an adequate
representation of consensus, then please let me know.
[By that, I mean it reflects the meaning that people have described,
not necessarily the words that they used to describe them.]


Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding                            <http://roy.gbiv.com/>
Chief Scientist, Day Software              <http://www.day.com/>

p.s., as Mike just mentioned, the uppercase I in Internet is intentional
       because this is a Draft Standard for the Internet, and hence the
       concern was that people would assume it only applied to Internet
       accessible resources.  Anyway, that sentence has 10 years of
       history that I seek not to repeat again.

Received on Friday, 28 May 2004 19:34:27 UTC