Re: Interacting with a URI, when is the result not a representation and what is it called.

Hi Dave,

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 12:27:21PM -0800, David Orchard wrote:
> My Question #1 is thus: It seems like there are two choices wrt
> interactions:
> a) Interacting with a URI always produces a representation, whether or not
> it's a badly designed interaction or not.

That's my understanding.

>That is, representations are the
> complete set of results from the interaction.

The results of an interaction would be some number of messages.  The
representation(s) would be encapsulated within those messages.

> b) Interacting with a URI can result in something other than a
> representation.  This means we probably need another noun for what is the
> result of the interaction. And we also need another verb for the name of the
> type of interaction.
> 
> Which leads to question #2, if the answer to #1 is b, then are those URIs -
> such as a bad HTML form - considered "on the web" or not?

Mu. 8-)

> I can only conclude the answer to #2 is yes, that is even badly designed
> non-RESTFUL forms are "on the web".  In which case, we need to talk about
> representations AND something else in describing the web architecture.
> Which has distinct implications for our arch document and the editing that
> we are going to do over the next few days.

AFAIK, at the application layer, the only data streams that don't
represent the state of some resource at some point in time, are
messages.  So I'd say that's the "something else" you're looking for.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Thursday, 6 February 2003 09:35:51 UTC