Re: Uniform access to descriptions

At 5:54 PM +0100 4/8/08, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
>Stuart,
>>Wrt to that resolution... a 303 response means *nothing*... if you 
>>happen to follow the redirection and find something useful about 
>>the thing you originally inquired of, that you trust and are 
>>prepared to stick in your reasoning engine, then you win - if not, 
>>of itself, the redirection has told you nothing/means nothing.
>>
>>200 tells you that the response convey as representation of the 
>>(state of?) referenced thing.
>>
>If this is what TAG accepts, i..e, 200=*representation of* as oppose 
>to "resource of".  I have no problem and would be happy with it.  My 
>perception is that TAG is recommending either explicitly or 
>implicitly the latter viewpoint.

Gentlemen, please both of you speak very slowly and carefully at this 
point, as a precise understanding here is critical.

Stuart, did you mean that the response conveys a representation in 
the webarch sense of the referenced thing? It would be helpful if 
every time the word 'represent' and its cognates are used in this 
very special sense, such usage were explicitly flagged, as it can 
very quickly lead to incomprehension when understood more broadly (as 
it is almost everywhere else in the English-speaking world.)

(Xiaoshu: from which it follows that in this case, the referenced 
thing in question must be something that has a 
webarch-representation; so, in this case, it cannot be some other 
kind of thing that cannot, by virtue of its very nature, have such a 
(webarch-)representation; so, to refer to such things - such, as we 
now might say, non-information resource things - requires something 
other than a 200 response. Thus goes the http-range-14 logic, as I 
understand it. Note that in order to follow this, all we need to know 
is that there are things which (a) cannot have a representation in 
the webarch sense but (b) that we might wish to refer to with a URI. 
Their exact nature need not be specified, but I believe that the 
language of 'information resource' boils down to  an attempt to 
characterize this category of [things that cannot be 
webarch-represented by a byte stream]. And, centrally important, not 
having a representation in the webarch sense does not mean not having 
any kind of representation, being unrepresentable, or not being 
describable. The webarch sense of 'representation' is very 
specialized and narrow.)

Xiaoshu, what do you mean by "resource of" a referenced thing? In my 
understanding of the terminology, resources (and things) may have 
representations of them, but are not themselves "of" anything.

Pat
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