Re: Historical - Re: Proposed IETF/W3C task force: "Resource meaning" Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

Nice concise history :)

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 10:14 PM, Tim Berners-Lee<timbl@w3.org> wrote:
> I would like to see what the documents all look like if edited to use the
> words Document and Thing, and eliminate Resource. That's my best bet as to
> two english words which mean as close as we can get to what we want. Note
> however that the web is a new system, a design in which new concepts are
> created, so we can't expect english words to exist to capture exactly the
> concepts. So we take those nearby and abuse them as little as we
> can as far as we can tell at the time, and then write them in initial caps to
> recognize that that is what we have done.

If you were to go in that direction, I think you ought to consider
adding "Service" as a third category. Thing at the top, with the
children document and service disjoint (not a complete partition,
obviously).

The reason is that services operate very differently than documents,
even though they can sometimes return documents. And what we consider
to be reasonable representations (web sense) of documents have a very
different flavor than the representations returned by services. If
this distinction was clear then we might have a much better go at
starting to more clearly document expectations on what are reasonable
representations to return in each case, something that is sorely
missing in the current documentation. (The usual answer - the
representation is whatever the owner wants it to be - not very
satisfying).

As an example we could then say that POSTs to a URI that denotes a
document are intended to change that document. And we could contrast
that with POSTs to services, which do all sorts of things, for example
run queries.

-Alan


-Alan

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 11:05:20 UTC