Shared Information Space

My first public take on the shared information space.  It's shorter than I
wanted, but at least it gets something on the table before I left on
vacation (back May 27th).  Hopefully it will provide a lead into the
document/resource/URI/REST discussions.

The Web is designed to present users with the perception of a shared
information space.  The Web uses URIs to identify the resources to be
shared, HTTP to transfer the representations of the resources, and a variety
of formats - HTML, JPEG, GIF - as the representation itself.  The REST
architectural style encapsulates this notion of a shared information space.

HTTP has been specially designed for REST interactions.  HTTP has a variety
of methods designed to manipulate resource state through represenation
transfer between resources(servers) and user agents(clients).  These methods
are: GET for retrieving a representation of a resource, POST for updating a
resource, PUT for creating a new resource, and DELETE for deleting a
resource.  In particular, the use of the GET method to retrieve the
representation of the resource has special import for the Web.  All
important resources should have a URI that the GET method can be used upon.
That is, any resource that may have a representation retrieved may be
considered important and should have a GET-able URI.  It is the
responsibility of the server designer to determine what and how resources
should be modeled.

Cheers,
Dave