Re: Information resources?

On Sep 7, 2004, at 7:17 AM, Norman Walsh wrote:

> The notion of "resources" and "information resources" is, from my
> perspective, a compromise designed to allow two world views to achieve
> consensus.

I think the distinction is useful and worth talking about in webarch, 
because it's something that people feel is real.  Obviously the 
condition of being an information resource is something you can only 
test by attempting to dereference, but there's clearly a distinction 
between something that you normally expect to be there and if it's not 
you assume breakage, and something that you've never seen and if you 
get a 404 you say "Oh well, just a name I guess".  So at some level, 
being an information resource is a *social* condition, a matter of 
expectations and behaviors.

Note that resources can change from non-information resources to 
information resources and this is normal and OK ("let's set the 
namespace name now and put something there when we get around to it"), 
while the reverse is damaging and should be discouraged.

Also note that per webarch, which says that "resources should have 
representations", resources which are not information resources are in 
some sense second-class.  This is just fine.  -Tim