Re: http-range-14: Suggestions or silence

OK, taking http://www.textuality.com/tag/s1.1.html as the starting 
point, this would be my suggestion for a replacement for the first 
para,

  URIs are context dependent identifiers. Typically the context of their 
  use will be shared and implicit, in which case URIs may be treated as
  if context independent. This cannot, however, be guaranteed in
  general. In cases where ambiguity is possible and would be harmful,
  mechanisms which allow independent agents to eliminate ambiguity and
  coordinate their uses of URIs should be provided. Explicit discussion
  of all the possible contexts of URI use is out of scope for this
  document.

  Whilst not the only framework for the interpretation of URIs, the REST
  architecture merits particular attention because of its close
  connection with the underlying protocols and infrastructure of the
  web. In REST a URI unambiguously identifies a Resource, an abstraction 
  for which there is a conceptual mapping to a (possibly empty) set of
  representations. The representations of a resource may vary as a
  function of factors including time, place, and the identity of the
  agent accessing the resource. For example, at the time this document
  was drafted, the URI http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/MXOA0069.html
  identified a REST Resource corresponding to Yahoo's weather forecast
  for Oaxaca, Mexico. The representations of this Resource depends on
  (at least) time, the expressed preference of the user for Fahrenheit
  or Celsius, and the identity of the user-agent software receiving the
  representation.

  The unambiguity of URIs in the REST framework makes it suitable for
  reasoning about certain classes of automated and semi-automated
  processing, particularly in cases where either the publisher of a URI 
  is accepted as authoritative or where there is some generally
  accepted third-party authority. It should be noted, however, that
  there are cases where these conditions cannot be met and hence
  where the REST framework of URI interpretation might be inappropriate.
  RDF, for example, allows weakly coordinated yet interacting agents to
  make assertions using URIs as identifiers. Here there might not be an
  authority able to practically rule whether the intended referent of a
  given use of, for example, http://www.w3.org/, is a particular
  document or a particular web-site, in which case independent
  assertions made using that URI might not be directly compatible. In
  these circumstances agents should be provided with sufficient
  additional contextual information or disambiguating mechanisms to
  eliminate any harmful consequences in practice.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 05:42:37 UTC