Maintaining uniformity with HTTP URIs

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 02:01:52PM -0700, Joshua Allen wrote:
> I would recommend not mentioning HTTP at all.

I think HTTP plays an important role in aspects of what's being
discussed here.  Namely, that its built-in accomodation for dealing
with types of variation in resource representations, provides resource
publishers with some tools to help maintain uniformity for their URIs.
Specifically, the Vary header, and the use of content negotiation (and
perhaps other features that aren't occuring to me at the moment).

Using TimB's Sect 1.1 example, the URI
http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/MXOA0069.html could have been an FTP
URI (FTP is also well deployed), but FTP doesn't handle any type of
variability very well.  So if somebody wanted Oaxaca's weather report in
PDF, the resource publisher would have to provide a separate FTP URI for
that information, whereas a single HTTP URI would suffice.

IMO, it's these types of features that make HTTP URIs able to identify
anything, not just in theory - because any scheme can do that - but in
practice.

The relevant TimBL design issue is;

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Generic.html

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 21:22:50 UTC