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

On 2009-08 -02, at 07:04, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> 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).

Yes, I agree adding Service would help relieve some confusion. I  
deliberately avoided it in the short history. There is a use in some  
ways for an ontology which ignores POST services completely, as many  
systems are just buil;t by making webs.

> 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.

In general POSTs to arbitrary things.   The case of POST to a list  
page creating a new page (from the posted content) and creating a  
entry in the list linking to the new content (like net news) I have  
not really seen used.
There is a special case in the read-write data we are playing with in  
which a POST to a document may contact a SPARQL/Update message to make  
an atomic change to the graph.  But in general a service tends to have  
arbitary semantics.  Of course it makes sense to me that if you do a  
GET on the service URI the service should give you some data about  
itself. (Should it us 303?)


>
> -Alan
>
>
> -Alan

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 19:49:04 UTC