Re: now://example.org/car (was lack of consensus on httpRange-14)

Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@apache.org]
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 9:05 PM
> > To: Champion, Mike
> > Cc: 'www-tag@w3.org'
> >
> > In my 8 years of experience as co-author of the HTTP and URI
> > standards and core developer for the Apache httpd Web server,
> > I have never once met a user of Web software who was confused
> > by the use of an http URI as an identifier.
>
> That's impressive. I meet people who are confused by HTTP URLs used as
> identifiers on a weekly basis. Of course, working with XML I am on the
> forefront of the grand experiment that is using HTTP URLs as
> identifiers.
>

That's just because you work at Microsoft.

I think Roy is speaking for the 99% of people who _use_ the web rather than
those that write programs that manipulate web tokens.

When putting together a good dictionary, what gets written down as the
definition of a word is what is discovered to be the definition as used by
people speaking the language. Such definitions change over time and some
words are context dependent, e.g. the same spelling can mean different
things depending on where it falls in a sentence, what the meaning of the
sentence is or which language is being used.

I see HTTP URIs as forming a distributed dictionary. Folks can _introduce
their own words_ by placing a definition at an HTTP URI. These words can be
used in conversations, just like other words, and folks can _discover_ the
meaning of the word by clicking on it. To me, that is the essential property
that makes the web interesting.

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 08:24:36 UTC