RE: The range of the HTTP dereference function

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote,
> the point is that there's no way, given *just* a URI, to guarantee 
> that a resource has but a single given representation. There are 
> cases where this is obviously less than perfect. Ideally, there'd 
> be something akin to Etag standardized for use in URI's. 

I more or less agree, but I don't think this goes quite far enough.

What you're saying here is that (without additional information),

1.  The URI -> resource mapping is unique.
2.  The resource -> representation mapping is ambiguous.

and you want some mechanism to resolve the ambiguity in (2). This
would give us,

1. The URI -> resource mapping is unique.
2'. The resource -> representation mapping is unique.

But now it's very hard to see why we need the resource/representation
distinction at all: any disambiguation mechanism which would work
to resolve a resource -> representation ambiguity would work just as
well to resolve a URI -> resource ambiguity.

Given that the de facto ambiguities wrt URIs run much deeper than
the resource -> representation ambiguity it seems to me that we'll
get much further if we push the problem up to he URI/resource level
and solve the problem there.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Sunday, 31 March 2002 06:07:17 UTC