Re: My action item on Moby Dec, issue 14, etc

/ noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com was heard to say:
| When a server first supplies a representation, and marks it cacheable, I 
| think that is creating a contract that affects future accesses to 
| something. 

It's a pretty loose contract, I think. It says, "If you attempt
another retrieval before the expiry date, it's OK if you get back a
cached representation. If it's not exactly the same as the
representation you'd get if there wasn't one in the cache, I don't
care."

| thing.  Specifically, whenever you serve up the weather, you presumably 
| want to set the "don't cache me, >I< might be a cat next time" bit.  The 
| "I" in that phrase seems like it's what's behind the URI. 

Nah, I just don't care if you get the cat or the weather.

| There may be other examples.  I agree that we can't and shouldn't keep 
| owners of URIs from causing them to range over a supprisingly wide range 
| of data that might collectively represent a (whimsical) resource.  I'm 
| less convinced that there isn't, at least in some sense, a single 
| abstraction that is indeed an observable resource behind even such oddball 
| URIs.

Yes, it's useful to give names to things, even if the name alone
doesn't tell you very much. Consider, for example, "Norman Walsh" (and
assume for the moment that that is an unambiguous reference to "this
one" :-). There's almost nothing about that resource that you can
determine from the fact that you have an identifier for it. I could,
in principle, change almost everything about myself: place of
residence, employer, occupation, political and social views, legal
name, SSN, spouse, even my gender, if I was determined and rich
enough.

It's still useful to be able to point to the (currently) tall guy with
(currently) brown hair and say, "that one's Norm".

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | There is nothing which human courage will not
XML Standards Architect | undertake, and little that human patience
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | will not endure.--Dr. Johnson

Received on Thursday, 19 September 2002 11:39:20 UTC