Re: "Homework" (was: [Minutes] 7 Jan 2002 TAG teleconference)

> At 09:52 AM 1/9/02 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
> >(I suggest that information representation issues must include some 
> >account of transformations that can be said to preserve the intended 
> >content in some way, such as rendering of HTML, or entailment in RDF.)
> 
> Hmmm... what's that to do with architecture?
> 
> When I said this, I meant that I see related efforts like XSLT and XQuery 
> as part of the information representation story.

My thought too.  I think there are important roles for both those
transformation technologies, but they would be used *within* the
architectural constraints imposed by REST.  For example, an intermediary
could use XSLT to convert WML retrieved from a GET, into XHTML.

My interpretation of REST suggests that information preservation is
explicitly a non-goal, and that what remains important is that the
information that is ultimately delivered remains a representation of
the resource.  Of course, this doesn't prevent extensions from being
defined that can be used to identify when information has changed (be
that with a digest such as Content-MD5, or some kind of canonical
encoding of the Infoset), only that it isn't a required component of
the architecture.

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, 9 January 2002 10:28:29 UTC