RE: Resource definition

On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 18:21, James M Snell wrote:
> Ok, that's fine, but where do you draw the line?  If everything becomes a 
> resource then the idea of a resource begins to lose value.  Simply 
> asserting that "All Web services have an identity and are therefore 
> resources" doesn't seem to add any value.  

Its not intended to add very much value other than the fact that you now
have an identifier for it. Its what  you build on top of that by making
system specific assumptions and standards that ends up being useful. But
its also a fact that you can't build something system specific until you
have a common way of identifying nodes on the network.

Take IP for example, without TCP, UDP and ICMP its rather a useless
protocol. But it does give you an addressing scheme and a  basic packet
format that you then build on to make useful things happen. Resources by
themselves are pretty useless. But once you have something like RDF and
a set of rules for what to expect in an RDF graph, well then you have
something!

> Personally, I believe that Dave 
> Orchard's question in the original note that I responded to should have 
> been something like "1. The W3C TAG should darned well write up what 
> **class of resources are most relevant** from a web architecture 
> perspective"  

Now that's a much more interesting and tractable question!


> If the answer to that question includes the class of 
> resources that describe mechanisms of accessing other resources then 
> you've got something valuable because you've narrowed down the scope.  If 
> the answer is "any resource with an identity" then y'all will just 
> continue to spin your wheels and not get anywhere.
> 
> Ok, I'm done... shutting up and going back to my corner ;-)

I think that's the right approach. I personally would like to see the
_web_ architecture to be broad enough to be synonymous with the RFC 2396
definition. Its things like RDF, REST, web services etc that should have
the more narrow constraints....

-MM

Received on Tuesday, 18 February 2003 18:38:43 UTC