- From: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:53:02 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 / Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> was heard to say: |> representation of = something which portrays a resource; most often |> in the arch doc a bag of bits with a MIME type and other metadata, | | That is: an expression in some identified language, a message with | meaning. Bits + MIME Type == bits (raw information) + language | identifier (indicating, by reference, the syntax and semantics of the | language). Sounds good. In practice there's a kind of language | layering and combining going on, with markup languages and header | fields, but that can probably be ignored at this distance. | | But the important question is this: what is this "portrays" | relationship between the resource and the representation. So far | people have suggested that the respresentation: | | 1. entirely communicates all that is knowable about the resource | (easy for OOP systems; I think this is REST's answer) I don't think this can really be the answer. Even absent any sort of SW, it's possible to utilize information that's external to the resource. Google's pagerank for example. | 2. communicates enough information about the resource to uniquely | identify it in the universe, and also tell you some useful stuff | about it I don't think representations are required to provide any information about unique identification. That's what the URI is for. | 3. conveys "a lot" about the resource, most of the stuff a typical | user would want to know | (probably the typical web answer) | | 4. conveys some information probably related to the resource | (the usual RDF answer) I'm not sure I see a meaningful distinction between 3 and 4. | 5. there is no relationship in general.... :-) I'm tempted to suggest that that is obviously true, but I think that'd be unwise. At any event, I'm not willing to exclude this answer today. | This is where the challenge is. One of them, anyway :-) Be seeing you, norm - -- Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM | On the other hand, you have different fingers. XML Standards Architect | Web Tech. and Standards | Sun Microsystems, Inc. | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iD8DBQE/JY0uOyltUcwYWjsRAtBuAJ0QcUhVDqUKTvQ2zRWeJoUQvCnwjQCfQDxm EM1RXjIQs/0opHE21Zicuq4= =lY6j -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 16:53:58 UTC