Re: HTTP Endpoints and Resources

Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
> 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.
>   
No.  That would be a wrong definition.  Assuming if I have a huge binary 
file at http://example.com/hugefile.  On most request, I may redirect it 
to another document say http://example.com/hugefile.rdf, where I will do 
two things: (1) warn the requester that to retrieve the resource might 
take forever and (2) if they do insist on getting the resource,  use a 
particular MIME type.  So, http://example.com/hugefile is a "information 
resource" but can respond 303.

Also, in reference to an earlier post of you that *why* it is important 
to distinguish "information resource" from non-IR.  I think because IR 
are those things that we can directly manipulate with the SW technology 
and non-IR are those resource that we cannot.  For instance, we can 
fetch an XML document, attach a XSLT stylesheet to transform it into 
another doc.  But we cannot fetch a hard-copy XML document and shred 
them in pieces.

Xiaoshu

Received on Saturday, 29 September 2007 10:12:10 UTC