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

David, Mark,

I think that I understand "hypermedia as the enegine of application state" as a concept, however both of you seem to indicate that there is some rule here that stands to be broken. Could eiether of you state crisply what that rule is? I've had a quick look in the oracle.. and have come up empty.

Thx,

Stuart
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________________________________
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Orchard
Sent: 25 July 2008 18:00
To: Mark Baker
Cc: Henry S. Thompson; www-tag@w3.org
Subject: 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<mailto: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.