Re: Private naming conventions and hypermedia (was Re: Draft minutes from TAG telcon of 2008-07-24

+1 to Hypermedia as engine of state transfer and thus Mark Baker's comment.


I wonder about scalability of the number of different names for the same
resource.  Could there be hundreds, thousands, millions of different names
for a a given resource, and how many resources could potentially have that
number of duplicate names?  Could the link header/whatever blow up in size?

A different solution is that the link header/whatever could contain a
reference to the private naming convention used.  This is analogous to the
html forms and html media type.  This also preserves the hypermedia as
engine of state transfer rule.

Cheers,
Dave

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 9:41 AM, Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> wrote:

>
> > HST [...] I think there's a fundamental issue we need to be clear on: is
> it OK for a group of domain name owners to agree a naming convention amongst
> themselves? In the ARK case, this trespasses on the WebArch advice wrt
> aliasing, and in general might also seem to fall foul of the whole business
> of URI opacity (that was Mark Baker's particular concern).
>
> "URI Opacity" is a term that I've found means different things to
> different folks, so I try to avoid it now.  But I do believe that
> private naming conventions do cause harm to the Web because they are
> essentially a proprietary form of link and link metadata.  If two URIs
> at different domains identify the same resource, dereferencing one of
> them should provide a declaration (Link header, RDFa, whatever) that
> the resource is the same (owl:sameAs or equivalent) as the other.
>
> >From a REST perspective, the architectural constraint that's being
> disregarded by this practice is "hypermedia as the engine of
> application state", and IMO, it's the constraint most responsible for
> imparting Web-nature.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark.
>
>