- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 16:14:37 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- cc: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
[snip] I'm inclined to agree. SOAP Web service endpoints are another good example of http:-named resources for which the 'document' metaphor seems to be over-stretched. There's a large class of http:-named resource for which the resource can be exhaustively described by a content-typed bag of bytes. But there are other resources (typically those that wrap databases, services etc) for which we can never get a complete rendering of 'the thing itself', only exchange messages with it. The document metaphor(*) seems too passive a notion to effectively characterise such resources, yet in practice we deploy http: names for them without much trouble. Dan (*) and it _is_ a metaphor; we shouldn't get too hung up on arguing whether a Web service really 'is' a kind of document, since we're mostly testing the limits of our intuitions about the word 'document' here, rather than probing anything interesting about the world.
Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 16:14:40 UTC