Re: How do you POST to a "document"?

Sandro Hawke wrote,
> So I think of the web as mediated shared memory.  Each web address
> (URI) points to a storage location.  GET means to read the contents
> of a location, PUT means to store replacement contents in a location.
> Sometimes I think of the locations as individual whiteboards,
> bulletin boards, shelves, slots, or parts of a landscape where a
> signboard could be placed.

I think this is a perfectly legitimate way of conceptualizing the web. 

But it's not obviously the one implicit in RDF. REST has yet another. 
And my personal favourite of the moment is to think of the web as 
comprised of processes and communication channels, where URIs name 
communication endpoints rather than either shared memory locations, or 
things in general, or abstract Resources. I'm sure other people have 
other outlooks. Probably more than one, depending on the time of day 
and the phase of the moon.

All are legitimate. All have their uses. All of them can be used as 
guiding principles for building systems which do useful work. And if 
someone adopts one rather than another that won't stop any code from 
working. So I think it's critical that the Web Architecture not 
underwrite any one of these views at the expense of the others. 

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 14:04:40 UTC