Re: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft

Patrick Stickler wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> Using an http: URL to denote a rock in my back yard or the concept of
> 'spicy' does not make either of those things web-accessible or
> the latter concrete.
> 
> And if those URLs really *do* denote those non-web-accessible things,
> then putting anything else at that URL which would be accessible
> is a bug.

Nobody is talking about "putting something else at that URL." Rather
they are talking about making it such that doing a GET on the rock's URI
returns a *representation of the rock*. The thing at the URL is still
the rock. But rocks can't move over the Internet so the GET fetches the
next best thing, a representation (picture, web page, whatever).

>...
> If the resource is not web-accessible, then it should not be denoted
> by a URI that is dereferencable -- or if it is dereferenced, nothing
> should be returned.

I don't think the term "web-accessible" is well-defined but I think you
seem to mean that "if a resource is other than a bag of bits that can be
delivered over the web, then it should not be denoted by a URI that is
dereferencable." But according to the HTTP specification, *no resource*
is a bag of bits. Or at least Web clients have *no access* to the bag of
bits that might be the internal site representation of the resource. All
they have access to are representations, whether the resource is a rock,
or a namespace, or a document or a database record.

>...
> A schema is not a representation of a vocabulary. Sorry. Nope. It's
> something that uses the terms of a vocabulary, but the vocabulary itself
> is abstract, just as are the terms.

Why not?

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Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2002 12:07:25 UTC