RE: HTTP Endpoints and Resources

Hello David, thanks for your response.

I think that I'm starting to sense some consensus. I believe that on this
particular topic, you, Pat and I have said pretty much the same thing
during the last round of postings.

> I agree entirely with your analysis about 303 responses and 
> HTTP endpoints.  I am only concerned that the terminology 
> that you are using is likely to be confusing if you posit a 
> thingie that responds with a
> 303 code for a URI.
 
Actually, though I'd love to take any credit, I didn't actually posit
this. It's in the HTTP spec. The thing that responds with a 303 is a
resource, in the sense in which that term is defined in RFC2616[1] (and
which I've labelled http:resources for the purposes of this thread).

I note your comment on potential confusion, but I think that can be
handled by defining denotation and access carefully, in sort of way that
Pat distinguishes them. 

> 
> So I suppose if you do go down this route of defining a class 
> of "HTTP endpoints", which are the thingies that send 200 or 
> 303 responses, then you could define "information resource" 
> as being the subclass of HTTP endpoints that send 200 responses.
> 

Quite so. And I think Pat has also said something similar. I was quite
attracted to this notion because it positions traditional uses of the Web
(documents, information resources etc.) a special case of a more general
mechanism. Not only are information resources the subset of http:resources
that return 200, they are also the subset where what is denoted is what is
accessed. 

That worked for me anyway.

Best wishes
Rhys


[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html

Received on Friday, 28 September 2007 14:02:41 UTC