- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 16:16:40 -0700
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, WEBDAV WG <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
- Cc: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, Patrik Fältström <paf@swip.net>
> At the working group meeting, there seemed to be some disagreement > about this point; Jim seemed to think (emphatically) that it was > required that the mapping between 'resource' and 'URL' was 1-1, > but others seemed to assert that it might be 1-many. I don't believe the rest of this discussion can be addressed until this point is cleared up. The reason I hold that the mapping between resource and URL is 1-to-1 is that I believe there is no way for an HTTP client to tell the difference between the following cases: Assume: URL A and URL B both retrieve entity E on an HTTP GET: A) Both A and B are identifiers for the same resource. B) Both A and B are identifiers for different resources which happen to return the same entity. Since it is impossible for a client to tell the difference between these two cases, it makes sense to me that there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between URI and resource. However, I can certainly see that an underlying repository might map the same "chunk of persistent state" to one or more URI/resource pairs. So, while I hold that there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between URI and resource, I also accept that there can be a many-to-one correspondence between URI/resource pairs and "chunks of persistent state". - Jim
Received on Monday, 31 August 1998 19:21:05 UTC