- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 00:40:55 -0400
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
Jonathan Rees writes: > I agree with most of what you say, and your question is a perfectly > fine one. Good, thank you. > My answer is that IMO there is value in httpRange-14, even if > there isn't significant practical value. > [...} > httpRange-14 is useful in that if a 200 comes from a server that > adheres to it, AND you know that the server adheres to it, then you > learn that the thing is an IR, and therefore not a hen's egg or > doorjamb or protein function. The preconditions are a tall order, and > the result not terribly informative, and probably not useful to a > computational agent. But it's better than nothing, and might give > guidance to a human trying to understand the URI. > > The utility of httpRange-14 is significantly reduced as long as not > all minters of URIs for non-IRs adhere to it. I have no idea what the > penetration of httpRange-14 is, but my guess is that it is and will > remain low. My concern with the above is that it seems to be based on the assumption that carrying forward the httpRange-14 decision is a low cost path, so if proomoting it generates even small incremental value, we should. I think that in practice we've seen that there has been considerable cost to httpRange-14, at least insofar as it's caused confusion. Users seem to have trouble agreeing on what an information resource is, whether or not it's necessarily the same as a "document", and thus how to apply the decision and what one can in fact infer from a 200. I think we should stick with the httpRange-14 decision iff we can show that it will be widely understood and deployed, and that it will in typical cases deliver the value we expect. One thing that particularly troubles me in what you've written is the precondition "if a 200 comes from a server that adheres to it, AND you know that the server adheres to it, then...". Regardless of the merits of the httpRange-14 decision in particular, the whole point of the self-describing Web is that we should avoid relying on such prior "private" agreements between server and client. If we can get to the point where a relatively high percentage of resource deployers understand the concept of Information Resource, and get them to use 200 as the httpRange-14 decision suggests, and if that indeed proves practical in helping semantic Web users to distinguish IR's from others, fine. Saying that httpRange-14 has value because select pairs of client and server will agree to observe it doesn't seem right to me. Thank you. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Monday, 7 April 2008 04:41:08 UTC