Re: Proposal to amend the httpRange-14 resolution

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 1:55 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-03-31 at 22:01 +0900, Tore Eriksson wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:09 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
>> > The basic requirements behind issue-57 and the httpRange-14
>> > rework are:
>> >
>> >  1. There must be a standard, algorithmic way for a client,
>> >  given a target URI, to find the URI owner's implicit or
>> >  explicit *definition* for that URI.
>> >
>> >  2. The URI owner must be able to provide an arbitrarily
>> >  detailed definition (though not necessarily for a URI of
>> >  every possible syntactic form).
>> >
>> >  3. In the case where a URI owner has served a page with
>> >  no explicit URI definition, the algorithm must specify an
>> >  implicit definition (though possibly empty).
>>
>> I just don't get this last requirement. Why is this necessary and how
>> can you define something if you don't know what it is? And what is an
>> empty definition, especially considering the OWA?
>
> An empty definition means that the interpretation is not constrained at
> all by the definition.  This is semantically equivalent to having no
> definition.
>
> This last requirement is necessary because we need to decide how to
> handle the case of the 10^11 web pages for which the URI owner has not
> explicitly said anything about how the page's URI should be
> interpreted.

I'm sorry, but that is not very convincing. How would an empty
definition (a.k.a. no definition) help you with this?

Tore

Received on Monday, 2 April 2012 14:11:49 UTC