- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@apache.org>
- Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:51:58 -0700
- To: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
> It isn't illegal or illogical or wrong to use http URIs to identify > things that aren't documents. But it is potentially misleading, is > likely to introduce ambiguity that it would be better to avoid, and is > not obviously superior to mechanisms that don't have these defects. > (Or, more accurately, if it is superior, I don't see how.) > > Progress? No. You have left out all of the HTTP-based services that are not documents, by any stretch of the imagination, and yet still are identified by "http" URIs. "almost all" is not ALL. I see no reason why the web architecture document should claim something that is obviously false, particularly when it is used within millions of transactions every day. The fact is that "most users" don't know that the target of a submit button is a URI that usually begins with "http". It is also a fact that most users of automated tools based on libwww-perl never see the URI. It is reasonable to expect the same will be true of WSA. If most users think that "http" means document, then all I can say is that most users are not developers of WWW technology. http URIs identify resources via the http naming convention. That is all that ever needs to be said, anywhere, for any system that makes use of http URIs (semantic or otherwise). The only way you can start to make assumptions about the kind of resource associated with a URI (any scheme) is to see it in use: <a href="..."> is a context for a resource that responds to retrieval requests, whereas <foo xmln="..."> is not. In any case, making claims about resources by examining their scheme completely fails when considering all of the other schemes, especially "urn". As such, this claim does not help the SW architecture at all, and in fact is actively harmful to it because it is used as an excuse not to fix the fundamental problems of associating identity with a bare URI. There are no special categories of "information resource". Any URI provided within a retrieval context is assumed to be an information resource. The scheme is irrelevant to such assumptions. The right solution is to fix the Semantic Web so that it doesn't throw away method semantics, as it does currently by assuming a URI denotes what is obtained by a response to GET. None of this has any impact on the principle that it is unwise to use the same URI to identify multiple resources. That argument is and always has been a red herring, and is not solved by claiming that "http" means document. ....Roy
Received on Friday, 25 July 2003 02:46:28 UTC