RE: Uniform access to descriptions

Hello Alan,

I really wish that we could 'nail' this kind of question...

I happen to prefer to think of things in this way...

    That the questions asked of the web in the form of, say, HTTP GET, HEAD... operations are questions asked of the web and that it is the web that responds.

    The web, broadly offers 4 kinds of answers:

        - Here's a awww:representation of what you asked about (2xx responses)
        - Asking a suggested different question may yield a better answer (3xx responses)
        - SOL (4xx responses)
        - Something in the infrastructure is broken (5xx responses)

This completely avoids having to attribute responsive behaviour to the things of the web themselves, though the web is able in some sense to 'inspect' at least some 'things' inorder to formulate its response. Instead one attributes responses to the infrastructure of the web itself which, afterall, is what creates the illusion that a sequence of magnetic domains organised in a sectored radial fashon on a disk is a document (any document let alone a Microsoft Word document). It also avoids other quagmires... which I'll avoid now my not mentioning further :-).

Just a question about this document that you have in mind:
    How are you identifing it? [eg. by name, say in a filing system; by bit/sequence of its serialisation...]

Stuart
--
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Registered No: 690597 England

________________________________
From: Alan Ruttenberg [mailto:alanruttenberg@gmail.com]
Sent: 09 April 2008 06:50
To: Pat Hayes
Cc: wangxiao@musc.edu; Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol); Jonathan Rees; www-tag@w3.org WG; Phil Archer
Subject: Re: Uniform access to descriptions

On Apr 9, 2008, at 12:59 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
We have no idea. It could be anything, just as a 303 redirect tells us nothing about what the URI is obliged to denote. Http-range-14 is silent on both of these cases. It only specifies that in the case of an unhashed URI returning a 200 response, the URI is understood to denote the resource that emits the response.

So an IR is the sort of thing that can emit a response.
Which means it can't be the Microsoft Word document I just worked on, since as far as I know, such things aren't capable of emitting anything.

Do I have this right?

-Alan