Re: Splitting vs. Interpreting

(Whoops, hit reply instead of reply-to-all.)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@miscoranda.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Splitting vs. Interpreting
To: "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote:

> Yes... but would that be the same URI as the one that was used to
> obtain that first representation? I don't think so.

I'm not sure what you're asking, but I suspect you don't believe that
a URI can denote something that doesn't exist at the time of creating
the URI. But there are weirder URIs than that:

file:///Users/sbp/example.txt

What does that one identify?

So yes, an HTTP URI that identifies the first representation
dereferenced from it is extremely peculiar. But it is possible, and
you can come up with other peculiar things.

> Also would representations of resource 'denoted' by that URI be byte
> wise identical to the original representation?

No, they need not be. As AWWW says:

‘A representation is data that encodes information about resource
state. Representations do not necessarily describe the resource, or
portray a likeness of the resource, or represent the resource in other
senses of the word "represent".’

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Thursday, 18 June 2009 17:30:24 UTC