Temporally extended sessions

• From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
• Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:19:08 -0800
• To: www-tag@w3.org
• Message-ID: <3E36D7AC.8040208@prescod.net>

Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
>...
> 
>    [Ian]
>           TB: If your protocol needs a notion of a temporally extended
>           session, then HTTP won't help you.
>           DO rhetorically: Why would you need one of those? You'll need
>           to include some examples.

I think that in most cases there is virtue in making temporally extended 
sessions into URI-addressable, HTTP-retrievable resources. HTTP does not 
itself have a notion of temporally extended session, but neither does it 
have a notion of "map" or "auction" and yet it delivers representations 
of resources of those types. I don't dispute that HTTP has limitations. 
But I think that there is a lot of "shortcut thinking" when it comes to 
enumerating those limitations. "HTTP doesn't have X as a first-class 
concept therefore HTTP is not appropriate for X." That needs to be 
demonstrated, not asserted.

  Paul Prescod

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2003 14:19:31 UTC