Re: Generic-Resources-53: URIs for representations

Patrick Stickler writes:

> I this case, I'd argue that these URIs do not in
> fact denote Representations, but rather resources
> which are tightly related to the clock resource,
> and corresponding to particular "modes of view",
> and which share representations with the clock
> resource -- such that at any given time, both the
> URI of the clock and the URI of the mode of view
> may resolve to the exact same representation, yet
> neither of those resources are themselves
> Representations.

Yes, that's clearly one of the sensible formulations.  My concern is that 
people tend to speak somewhat informally.  When they say:  "I want a URI 
for the image/jpeg representation of the clock", they sometimes mean for 
some particular bit stream, as you propose, and sometimes mean for the 
resource that will give the time-varying image/jpeg.  Sometimes they don't 
notice the potential issue.   My point was that, given the ambiguity in 
informal usage, it's worth explaining carefully which we mean when writing 
Recommendations, TAG findings, etc.

Note that URIs for the time-varying abstraction are reasonably common. For 
example, the  XHTML Recommendation 2nd Edition [1] has links to 
"Postscript Version" [2], "PDF Version" [3], etc.  Knowing what I do about 
W3C URI-allocation policies it's a good bet that the octet stream returned 
for these will change if there's a 3rd edition.  That doesn't prove we 
should call these URIs "for the PDF representation", but I bet that at 
least informally a lot of people will.

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/xhtml1.ps
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/xhtml1.pdf



--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2006 17:53:05 UTC