Re: lack of consensus on httpRange-14

> "Via that interface" is particularly useful in clarifying the range of
> HTTP.  Clearly, the URL which HTTP uses identifies the *interface*, and
> not anything else.

Clearly, you haven't been paying attention.  The fact that the identifier
is an address to an interface does not prevent it from being used as
an identifier for anything at all.  It only provides one default
opportunity for use of that identifier, and one that isn't even
guaranteed to respond with 200 OK.  There are a million other uses
that could only use it as a name and have every single property of
persistence as any other name assignment.

> Sometimes people might point to a family portrait hanging on the wall to
> identify a particular person in conversation.  The picture frame is
> clearly *not* the person, it simply serves as an identification proxy.
> When people want to be far less ambiguous in identifying a particular
> individual, they tend to use identity proxies which are specialized for
> unambiguously identifying individuals (SSN, etc.)

SSN is an address for an account on the Social Security Administration's
database.  The fact that the IRS and MIT both use the same address to
identify people, in spite of the fact that one person can have multiple 
SSN,
should demonstrate to you that the mechanism for defining the name has
very little to do with the mechanisms for using the name, other than the
fact that the naming authority determines how much trust you can have in
the mapping over time.  Besides, anyone who owns a domain name can use
their namespace as a one-to-one mapping to SSN, which produces identifiers
which are every bit as useful for identifying people as the original SSN.

All identifiers are identity proxies.  You claim that people use the
"http" URI to identify the interface.  I claim, and have demonstrated
with MOMspider, that authors use most "http" URI in the hopes of 
identifying
a sameness of information over time -- otherwise, there would be no need
for them to correct references when the information changes to something
they didn't intend to reference.  Furthermore, the action GET does not
retrieve the resource, but only a representation of the resource, and
thus no assumptions can be made about the resource based purely on its
responses to the GET method.  Finally, the fact that most http URI do
identify information sources does not in any way prevent some http
URI from identifying things that are not information sources, as is
the case for information sinks and resources that have no interface
at all, and there is no reason whatsoever to claim that such resources
are any less useful to the Web than those that seem to be "documents".

....Roy

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 17:33:08 UTC