RE: Resources and representations (was RE: Subgroup to handle semantics of HTTP etc?)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@ihmc.us]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:30 PM
> To: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)
> Cc: Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol); wangxiao@musc.edu;
> W3C-TAG Group WG; Alan Ruttenberg; Jonathan A Rees; Dan
> Connolly; Tim Berners-Lee
> Subject: RE: Resources and representations (was RE: Subgroup
> to handle semantics of HTTP etc?)
>
> >  > From: Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)
> >>  [ . . . ]
> >>  The HTTP range question simply asks what sort of things can
> >>  an HTTP URI refer to?
> >>  And the answer given is 'any kind of thing' (whether or not
> >>  their is a '#' in the spelling of the URI).
> >
> >True, but to be clear, the WebArch also imposes some additional
> >constraints that depend on: (a) what kind of resource is denoted;
> >and (b) the media type returned when the URI is dereferenced.  In
> >particular:
> >
> >  - If the URI denotes a non-information resource and the URI has a
> >fragment identifier and a 200 response is returned when the racine
> >(the part before the '#') of the URI is dereferenced, then the media
> >type returned must be a media type that permits its fragment
> >identifiers to denote arbitrary resources.   For example, you may
> >return RDF but *not* (currently) HTML, because the media type for
> >RDF permits a fragment identifier to denote anything, whereas in
> >HTML a fragment identifier denotes a location within the document.
>
> Does the HTML spec mention denotation?

Yes, but not using that word.  :)  The HTML 4.01 spec uses the term "refer to":
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/intro.html#h-2.1.2
and the text/html media type spec RFC 2854 uses the term "designates":
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt
and URI spec RFC 3986 uses the term "identfied":
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

In these contexts I think all of these terms are intended to refer to the same concept, which is the idea that a URI is associated with a resource:

I currently prefer the term "denote"

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:19:29 UTC