- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 18:39:15 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- cc: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>, "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, RDF-Interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Tim Berners-Lee wrote: > If you say that an HTTP header identifies a car, and then a GET returns a > picture, how do you refer to the picture? Tim, this problem is no different to those we run into with more traditional http:-named informational resources. Representations are transferred, either of informational or physical systems / entities. Sometimes we don't have a URI name for each distinct bytestream representation. Whether the representation is of a physical thing or not is irrelevant to this problem. http://www.w3.org/Icons/WWW/w3c_home If you say that an HTTP header (or http:-URIref) identifies a visual-work, and then a GET returns an image/jpeg or image/png bag of bytes, how do we distinguish between these three things? A partial answer might be reference-by-description: 'the image/png representation whose sha1sum is yaddayadda'. Why make work for ourselves? What worldy benefit is there in coming up with criteria for splitting the world into two huge disjoint categories: 'things that can be named with http:-uris, and things that can't'? Sure, the HTTP spec has woolly words about network / informational / resources and/or services, but what inferences do such vague categories buy us? Whatever happened to minimally constraining architectures...? Dan
Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 18:39:19 UTC