Re: Seeking Feedback on Capability URLs Draft

Some more feedback, regarding the following text from the Capability 
URLs doc (http://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/#web-architecture):

"Capability URLs encode a combination of a resource and access 
privileges for that resource. This leads to separate URLs being used to 
refer to the same resource (but with different permissions about what 
can be done with it). For example, Google Calendar provides different 
URLs for the same iCalendar representation of a calendar for public and 
private use."

I do not believe that capability URLs which are different are by 
definition referring to the same resource.

Take the following example:

"John's read-only calendar"
"John's writable calendar"
"John's calendar, read-only, shared with Dan & Jeni"

So although one might say that its the same resource behind all of 
these, one could also argue that for each example, there could be a 
different resource with a correspondingly different URI.

Imagine doing this without combining the resource itself with the 
authority to use the resource. How would you do that exactly? Well, you 
might be able to use the same URL to allow another user of the same 
service to access the same resource (say John's calendar). But what if 
you want to give read-only access to one user, and write access to 
another? You might do that by restricting the HTTP verbs accessible on a 
particular URI (but not on the other). In which case, you would still 
need two URIs to refer to the "same" resource, I think.

The idea behind this is that a user, when creating a capability URL for 
something, is giving a name to a new resource that he or she is creating 
to be shared with someone. She is giving someone else access to a 
resource which is NOT the same resource as the thing that she uses herself.

I can't say I'm too confident I know what a resource "ought" to be in 
web-arch terms, but I believe my example is a valid way to model a 
system. Or have I got this massively wrong?

As an aside, the reference to the AWWW good practice which follows the 
quoted paragraph might be thought a little "hand-wavy" - what exactly 
does it mean to "divide the neighbourhood" when using multiple URLs as 
described above, and why is that bad for the Web, if we agree that the 
example I describe above is a valid Web use-case?

Regards,

- johnk

On 05/23/2014 09:28 AM, Daniel Appelquist wrote:
> Hi folks - as discussed, I’ve made a blog post
> http://www.w3.org/blog/TAG/2014/05/22/capability-urls-feedback/ seeking
> some feedback on the Capability URLs draft. The goal here is to get some
> more eyeballs looking at this and feeding back to us so we can finalize
> this document and get it out the door as a finding by the July f2f. If you
> can help spread the word on this it will help get more feedback which will
> mean a better finding.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
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Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2014 16:17:52 UTC