Re: denotation of http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/magritte.gif

On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 22:54 Europe/Budapest, Reto 
Bachmann-Gmuer wrote:

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> The document http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI has following 
> exercise:
>
>> 2) What does "http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/magritte.gif" identify?
>>
>> (...)
>>    6. A representation as a series of 341632 bits in of a photo of a 
>> painting
>>    7. Validly 4, 5 and 6 but not 1
> According to the document the correct answer is 7
>> 2:7 Note here the web tolerates vagueness along the axis of different 
>> representations of teh same image, but not of semantic level betwen 
>> the image and the pipe.
>
> I'm confused that the URI could identify 6. If the server serving the 
> address is smart enough to return a jpeg insted of gif - if according 
> to the http-accept header my browser is not capable to interpret a gif 
> - - the URI would also identify "A representation as a series of 
> [size-of-jpeg] bits in of a photo of a painting" and the URI is 
> ambiguos.
>
> I think a HTTP-URI should identify a document as the abstract entity 
> that all of the possible result of a http-request represent, that is 
> the document independently of encoding and language.

That is a good way of running a server.  that is what
is represented on our server by the URI without a ".gif".

But it is also very useful to have a URI specifically for the GIF 
version.
So the best is to have both. But use the generic one wherever you can...

tim

> Cheers,
> Reto
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Received on Monday, 26 May 2003 16:52:04 UTC