"important" resources

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 03:26:00PM -0700, David Orchard wrote:
> I'm extremely familiar with the TAG finding, and you know that.  I was
> ...startled... that you chose to use that quote in a message to me.  The
> keyword that you don't seem to want to grasp is "important".  And who
> defines important.  Also the complete circularity of the argument.

Well, to be fair, you appear to have a higher bar when it comes to
determining "important" than do other TAG members that have expressed
an opinion.  Perhaps we can explore that.

> Position: use URIs for important resources.  What are important resources?
> Important resources are ones that need to be GETtable, that is have a URI.
> Use URIs for important resources, and important resources are those
> resources that have URIs.  voila, circularity and the URI eats it's tail.

Sure.  So let's look at the spectrum of "important".

I would say that pretty much all SOAP 1.1 + WSDL based Web services
appear to have an extraordinarily high bar for their definition of
"important".  i.e. the only thing that gets a URI is a single
"router"/rpc dispatch end-point, such as;

http://api.google.com/search/beta2
http://betty.userland.com/rpc2

And those "resources" don't even support GET.  So clearly, that's one
extreme, where "important" is interpreted to be "too important to worry
about".

I can't think of an example where *too many* things are given URIs, but
many services provide more than one.  The Amazon XML/HTTP API is one
example, if you're not comfortable with HTML based examples (though
I've been meaning to ask what you think of XHTML 8-).  Another would
be Moreover's news feeds, where each topic is given its own URI, upon
which HTTP GET returns an RSS/XML document;

http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html

So, where does your definition of "important" lie?  If you were doing
what Moreover does, would you give each topic a URI and use GET on it?
Or would you just have one URI for Moreover, and then address topics
with a string within some RPC call?  Or something else perhaps?
Enquiring minds ...

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2002 22:26:39 UTC