- From: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 08:51:30 +0000
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Mark Baker wrote, > On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 12:06:27AM +0000, Miles Sabin wrote: > > Exactly _what_ would that break? > > I'm not sure "break" is the right word. In the context of my reply to Tim Bray's mail, I think "break" is exactly the right word. Abstract Resources are ... abstract. If they were to all vanish in a puff of existential smoke tomorrow no code that was working properly before would stop working properly afterwards. > It would certainly reduce visibility into the message by HTTP > components that relied on the assumption that the URI in the HTTP > request line identified the resource being interacted with. I don't believe it would. I think that the property you're after is more a result of designing network systems with a particular mindset or methodology. It's perfectly legitimate to hypothesize abstract Resources if that helps you get your job done ... you could think of Resources as RESTs equivalent of Newtons frictionless euclidian planes: idealizing fictions which act as an organizing principle. Or, for that matter, like objects in OO, or functions in functional programming. But it's absolutely not legitimate to insist that that mindset or methodology is the only way of obtaining that useful property, or to insist that it's privileged to the exclusion of all else. That _does_ break things (in this case RDF), at least politically, by effectively ruling out other equally useful approaches. To make this last claim a little more concrete: RDF needs to have mechanisms for disambiguating URIs; but it's close to impossible for anyone argue for the addition of those mechanisms if the Web Architecture document says that URIs are by definition unambiguous so no disambiguation is necessary. Cheers, Miles
Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 03:52:02 UTC