Re: FW: draft findings on Unsafe Methods (whenToUseGet-7)

On Wednesday, April 24, 2002, at 05:53  AM, Mark Baker wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 11:17:07PM -0700, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> TimBL, with his director's cap on, made a presentation [1] at the AC
>> meeting in Hong Kong that belies this (there was a nice RDF-generated
>> SVG illustration of this that I can't seem to find, at the moment).
>
> Yes, I've seen that before.  I can only assume that by "XML Protocol
> Enhanced", TimBL was referring to the same use of SOAP as I've been
> advocating.
[snip]

I think I'll let people come to their own conclusions about that. To me, 
Tim's writings about conversations (here and elsewhere [1]) speak to an 
approach that is quite different to representational state transfer 
(which is central to your view of the Web architecture, unless I'm 
mistaken).


>> The Web is bigger than HTTP.
>
> Yes, but no bigger than HTTP's application semantics.

I think you might be taking this quote out of context;

   "And on the seventh day, He rested."

Seriously, isn't it a bit hubristic to say that REST is the only 
possibly successful architectural style for any kind of Web-scale 
application, and that the W3C should be prohibited from approaching 
problems from any other direction? I (yet again still) haven't 
completely read Roy's dissertation, but I wasn't aware that the W3C had 
accepted it as the One True Word of Web Architecture. I know that you 
and others feel that way, and I agree that REST is a great thing, but 
I'm not yet ready to assert that it's appropriate for every possible 
application to the exclusion of other solutions.

This isn't to say that REST shouldn't be evangelised or even preferred 
in most WGs' work; just that it shouldn't preclude other styles.

I despair to see the REST fundamentalist view; it indicates that efforts 
to come to a accommodation (like defining a HTTP-GET "binding") are 
useless, because they don't RESTify all Web Services.


1. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Conversations

--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 13:34:13 UTC