- From: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 10:44:23 +0300
- To: ext Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>, WWW TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
On 2002-07-03 21:27, "ext Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@openhealth.org> wrote: > In any case, since we disagree (and RFC 2068 isn't completely clear, nor is > RFC 2396 particularly helpful) this clarification is important for the > Architecture Document. I agree. > I would say: > > "A representation of a resource is a serialization of some description of > the resource. The representation may be full fidelity, i.e. a complete > description, or it may be partial, i.e. describes some aspect of the > resource. The interpretation of any such representation is determined by its > MIME type." *IF* a clear distinction was made between a "full fidelity" representation and a partial or proxy representation, such as a description or rendition, etc., and that distinction was communicated by the HTTP server when returning the representation, then I could live with that (other than the last sentence, which is nonsense, since a description of a resource could have the same MIME type as the resource itself, etc.). HTTP servers must make such a distinction clear in a similar fashion to that described in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2002MayJun/0039.html But if there is no distinction provided in the HTTP response codes, then while the above may be acceptable for humans surfing the web, it is completely unacceptable for Semantic Web agents -- which will presume that if they ask for a particular resource and get something back, it is a 'representation with full fidelity' and not something else. A Semantic Web agent that asks for a resource and gets a description of a resource is not going to necessarily realize it is not the same thing. If an HTTP server is not going to return the actual resource denoted by a given URI, in 'full fidelity' then it should say so. Any application (even any human) has a right to know that they are not getting what they asked for, and not be left to figure that out for themselves. Patrick -- Patrick Stickler Phone: +358 50 483 9453 Senior Research Scientist Fax: +358 7180 35409 Nokia Research Center Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com
Received on Thursday, 4 July 2002 03:44:20 UTC