Re: Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Xiaoshu Wang <xiao@renci.org> wrote:
>   
>> That is my point of argument.  What is this "close-to-identical" (the fidelity as in this Sotomayor's defense) is non-sense.  The "fidelity" is always be interpreted by some one or some group.  There is no escape of this "personal" context.   Take your "high resolution"as an example, how do you know if I am not wanting the high resolution in terms of the molecular structure of that book, instead of its content or image? You must define your 'resolution' before making it high.  You cannot say compare two things without setting the criteria of comparison.  In other word, you cannot say which thing is a better awww:representation better than the other.
>>     
>
> We are in a bit of trouble, then, unless we remove whatever
> corresponds to rfc2616 section
> 3.9: 'Quality Values' from the new spec. That section presumes that it
> is indeed possible to make assessments of similarity/quality (or
> relative degradation) of a representation as compared to a resource.
>
> BTW, this wouldn't be semantics creeping into the nice neat
> specification, would it?
>
> Here is what I expect the form of the answer will be, given the
> previous parts of this conversation. The words "quality" and
> "degradation" are not what you and I mean by "quality" (closest
> wordnet http://www.golovchenko.org/cgi-bin/wnsearch?q=quality#2n) and
> "degradation" (closes wordnet sense, nominalization of
> http://www.golovchenko.org/cgi-bin/wnsearch?q=degrade#3v). They are
> awww:quality and awww:degradation, terms which allow for some scale
> along which to order representations, the exact nature of such
> ordering this spec need not be concerned with.
>
> -Alan
>
> (ietf-http-wg cc removed per request of Mark)
>   
I would think otherwise.  As long as there is a URI owner, it is fine.  
All the semantics are semantics expressed by that URI owner.  I have 
thought about this but I don't see there is any other solution. 
Transparent content negotiation might help but only on very complicated 
cases. At last, it is a communication between two parties with no 
previous knowledge of each other.

Xiaoshu  

Received on Thursday, 16 July 2009 12:58:41 UTC