Re: httpRange-14 , what's the problem

I've read the RDF discussion and did not find anything there that
hadn't been discussed before.  Some people would like to limit the
"http" namespace to the identification of documents, even though they
are fully aware of hundreds of examples wherein an "http" URI is
being used to identify things that are not even remotely documents.

Logic states that the assertion

     "for all http URI x, x identifies document"

is false if there exists one http URI for which it is false.  Well,

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=send+gsm+message

will lead you to multiple sites that use an http URI as a form submit
destination and at no time is the user ever under the impression that
the URI identifies the document that is returned in the 200 OK response.

Likewise, we find at

  
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=web+robot+remote+control

that there are dozens of independently deployed physical objects that
can be identified and manipulated through "http" URI.

Therefore, the assertion is false and this discussion is over.  If the
Semantic Web's tools cannot reason about these resources then those
tools should be fixed.  REST has absolutely no problem or ambiguity in
modeling those identified resources as part of the real Web even
though they do not act like an information space.

This is not, in any way, a suggestion that all resources should be in
the http scheme space.  It merely proves that the arguments made about
the range of http being limited are simply false and do not deserve
any more of our time.

Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software
                  (roy.fielding@day.com) <http://www.day.com/>

                  Chairman, The Apache Software Foundation
                  (fielding@apache.org)  <http://www.apache.org/>

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2002 18:23:40 UTC