- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 15:40:46 +0100
- To: <gv@trace.wisc.edu>, "'WAI Cross-group list'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
> What is the WEB. It is HTTP retrievable information? Or any > information retrievable over TCP/IP? Or IP? Or via other > protocols? [...] What is the definition? The "Web", with a capital "W" is a common abbreviation for, "World Wide Web". It is a theoretical information space in which all resources (Web Resources) are identified by URIs, and can be referred to as such. On a day-to-day basis, the word "Web" is often used as a synonym for HTTP space, the space of information covered by all URIs beginning with "http://". That's my definition... Tim Berners-Lee defines it as:- [[[ World Wide Web (three words; also known as WWW) The set of all information accessible using computers and networking, each unit of information identified by a URI. ]]] - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/glossary But note that according to the URI specification, a resource doesn't just have to be a network entity (which isn't really implied by TimBL's definition, but could be mistaken as such):- [[[ Resource A resource can be anything that has identity. 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. Not all resources are network "retrievable"; e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library can also be considered resources. The resource is the conceptual mapping to an entity or set of entities, not necessarily the entity which corresponds to that mapping at any particular instance in time. Thus, a resource can remain constant even when its content---the entities to which it currently corresponds---changes over time, provided that the conceptual mapping is not changed in the process. ]]] - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt There are endless philisophical debates over what URIs, URI-Refs, resources (in URI/RDF) exactly constitute, but thankfully that doesn't stop the Web from working :-) -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> . :Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Sunday, 20 May 2001 10:42:35 UTC