- From: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:53:45 -0400
- To: "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us>, "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>, "Technical Architecture Group WG" <www-tag@w3.org>, "Susie Stephens" <susie.stephens@gmail.com>
> From: Pat Hayes > [ . . . ] > OK, fair enough. But now, lets cut out all this > gabble about 'information resource'. As I have > always suspected, this is ALL about HTTP codes. > If you do a GET with a URI and you get a 200 > response, then the URI is understood to denote > the resource that sent you that response, a > (REST-)representation of which you now have. > Otherwise, you know nothing at all about that the > URI denotes: it might denote anything. I agree 100%. I think the key question to ask is: *Why* is it architecturally significant to distinguish between "information resources" and non-"information resources"? Why doesn't the Web architecture distinguish between other interesting classes of things, such as mammals and non-mammals? AFAICT the answer is that some things are HTTP endpoints (i.e., can return a 200 response) and some are not, and this distinction is relevant to the Web architecture because when something is an HTTP endpoint a lot more architectural rules apply, such as content negotiation, media types, etc. AFAICT, whether something's "essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message"[1] is quite irrelevant. 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#def-information-resource David Booth, Ph.D. HP Software +1 617 629 8881 office | dbooth@hp.com http://www.hp.com/go/software Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not represent the official views of HP unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 16:54:49 UTC