Re: The range of the HTTP dereference function

> > I agree strongly with Dan and Roy here.
> > 
> > What feature would it take in HTTP to allow it to properly support
> > identifying cars?  You'd need some sort of assertion declaring a
> > relationship between a document and a real thing, right?
> > 
> > In other words, we'd need a way to declare that
> "http://www.markbaker.ca/"
> > (which identifies me), and "http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html" (which
> > identifies an HTML representation of me, aka my "home page"), were
> > related in this manner.
> 
> I think the problem is very simple.  If you declare that
> http://www.markbaker.ca/ represents the physical you, then you lose the
> ability to make assertions about the resource that is returned when you
> do a GET on that URI.

No, that's what /index.html is for - it identifies the HTML document.
Content-Location establishes the relationship between those two URI.

>  If you want to let some URIs do one thing and
> others another, you need a way for people (and machines) to figure out
> what the "default" sense of that URI is.  The other possibility is to
> *always* specify (when recording metadata about a URI) what sense you
> are using the URI.  This last option seems like the only safe one to me,
> since people obviously are insisting on using HTTP URIs to assign
> metadata about things that are *not* GET-able resources.

URIs should have a uniform meaning, i.e. one "sense".

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 18:46:29 UTC