RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

Manos Batsis wrote,
> Very simply, almost both sides are right. An HTTP URI represents a
> document or fragment (after all, that's what it points to), which in
> turn represents whatever. This should satisfy both sides. I don't 
> see the point of this argument.

I'm happy to agree with this in some cases, but not in all.

In some situations it makes sense to think of representation as 
transitive (ie. if the URI represents a document which in turn 
represents todays news, then the URI represents todays news), in which 
case the URI is still ambiguous without additional context.

In other situations there's no document for the URI to represent. This 
is often the case with namespace URIs, in which case they represent
an abstract namespace or nothing at all. If they do represent an
abstract namespace, then why would putting a retrievable document at
the end of them defeat their original non-retrievable reference?

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 10:24:52 UTC