Re: HTTP Methods

Quoting Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>:

> 
> 
> On Feb 25, 2004, at 16:48, ext Jon Hanna wrote:
> 
> >
> > Quoting Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>:
> >
> >> What if the resource denoted by the URI has an RDF/XML representation
> >> yet you don't want the representation of the resource, you want its
> >> description.
> >
> > Could you elaborate on the difference between "description" and
> > "representation"?
> >
> 
> C.f. http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html

D'oh. I had that page open in another window at the time and everything.

"Concise bounded descriptions of resources can be considered to be a form of
representation"
And I consider them as such.

"however they are a highly specialized form"
'Specialised' is relative.

"and not the most usual or obvious form in a web primarily intended for human
consumption"
Human consumption is a factor of rendering, not of data (reading raw HTML sucks
too).

Well, at least I remember why I wasn't convinced by MGET when it was first
mentioned on rdf-ig; I'm not convinced of descriptions as fundamentally
different to representations. I also think that "concise bounded resource
descriptions" are the minimum of any generally useful RDF representation, and
as such a GET for application/rdf+xml (or any RDF serialisation) should return
such a description (or as much of one as there is available information to
return), optionally with additional data (which granted could make for an
efficiency issue, indeed a heavy efficiency issue, since there would be unused
triples transmitted).

A triple that would belong in a "concise bounded resource description" that
wouldn't belong in a general application/rdf+xml representation would be a good
counter-argument ("good" in that it would make me personally more convinced),
otherwise it is relatively easy to produce the former from the latter (a lot of
unneeded triples, maybe the lot, could be discarded by a stream-based reader
quite efficiently).

I think I'm happier to discard triples than to use a new method.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 10:21:11 UTC