Re: terminological clarification

pat hayes wrote:

> Let me illustrate the point with a simple example. If you click on 
> http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/Yosemite.html
> your web browser will show you a picture of Yosemite valley with some 
> surrounding text which asserts, not unreasonably, that the web page you 
> are looking at is about Yosemite. ...

> Now, there are two ways we could use the above vocabulary to talk about 
> this.

I have a quibble with the presentation of one of the straw people, but 
also I have questions.  Does the difference between these stories 
matter? Does the difference between them have any observable effect on 
the behavior of software?

Most important: Is either of them a falsifiable hypothesis?

> First story (based on my understanding of REST). The "resource"  is an 
> idealized abstraction of this page on my server, thought of as a kind of 
> idealized Platonic document-in-the-sky (since this particular resource 
> is static)

Huh?  It's identified by a URI, it emits representations, that's all 
there is.  The Platonic abstractions are your own invention.
-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)

Received on Thursday, 24 July 2003 01:06:15 UTC