Re: HTTP Range Middle ground?

Paul Prescod wrote:


> Yes, it would be natural to say that the responder "represents" the 
> person but we already have a meaning for that word. Representations are 
> the things that go across the wire. Let's say that the HTTP resource 
> proxies for the real-world resource.

That's not natural at all, to my mind. And what if the responder is 
a web site, not a server? Norm's example works for his network, and 
mine. It does make sense for many of my customers. Please, this only 
gets worse through use. What stops me declaring another URI as 
denoting a specific server, or cluster, or site?

I vehemently do not need, or want, anyone telling me what the 
syntactic convention is for distinguishing Aurelius my computer from 
Aurelius the Emperor. Or Richard Harris. I can establish that by 
examining the intersection of statement properties, (yes Pat, I know 
they have no special standing), or inferring to the best possible 
explanation, if I or anyone else cared to write the code, or port 
someone else's.


>> Which you suggest, but I don't think a URI-syntax convention is called 
>> for.  Because there are a lot of other properties we're going to care 
>> about, not just ex:WebPage or not, and we can hardly encode them all 
>> in the URI. -Tim
> 
> 
> I think that is a non-sequiter. We aren't trying to encode properties in 
> the URI. We're trying to make the same URI serve _two functions_ without 
> causing semantic web ambiguities. 

No, we're trying to decide if the URIs canonically denote a 
particular class of entity. that's tricky because a) today there are 
no classes of entity in web or semantic web architecture, there are 
just resources, b) when you do divide them, say into resources and 
information resources, or servers and everything else, half the room 
house will disgree on the split.

Personally I'm not sure the TAG has to decide anything yet. It's the 
business of RDF and its descendents to take care of interpretive 
functions that map URIs to resources, not an ad-hoc syntactic 
conventions that came about because everyone was fed up and design 
by exhaustion set in.

What Tim Bray said and more - a URI convention is syntax salt.

Bill de hÓra

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2003 15:01:42 UTC