Re: Comments on the pretty pictures

Amy, it's unfair to describe these definitions[1] as "completely
innovative". As you can see from [2], a substantial part of the text was
already present in our previous draft.

Reading the "Architecture of the World Wide Web" document, I don't see 
where "interface" and "service" come into play. Also, I don't think the 
document suggests that a "resource" indicates "a subset of an interface 
on a service". Maybe you could elaborate on this?

Jean-Jacques.

[1]
<http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/wsdl12/wsdl12.html#intro_ws>
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-wsdl12-20030303/#intro
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/

Amelia A. Lewis wrote:

> In brief,
> 
> The nice pretty pictures in part 1, section 1.1 (figure 1-1 and 1-2) are
> certainly *pretty*.  The definitions embedded in them are completely
> innovative, however, and innovative in a way I would argue encourages
> maximum incomprehension.
> 
> The use of "resource" as a larger thing than "service" is a reversal of
> common use.  Commonest-of-all use of "resource" is in the terms "uniform
> resource locator" or "uniform resource identifier"; these terms
> implicitly define a resource as being an endpoint and an interface; the
> fact that multiple resources may point at the same abstract [something],
> or share its state, indicates that the general use of the term
> "resource" is to indicate a subset of an interface on a service.
> 
> Possibly something could be recovered by using a different term. 
> Redefining "resource" to be big-big-big in direct contradiction to its
> common usage is likely to produce massive email and teleconference
> discussions, due to confusion over the actual meaning of the term. 
> Among other things.
> 
> The definition of "service" in these graphics is that a service is a
> subset of a (web) service.  Again, innovative language.  Possibly,
> though, it is not best to define a service (element) to be a subset of a
> (web) service.  Service is a subset of a service is less than ... ideal.
>  At best.
> 
> These linguistic issues show up a fundamental conceptual problem.  If we
> have an element called "service", then it is sensible, reasonable, and
> intuitive that the element represent a web service; this interpretation
> is commonly applied to WSDL 1.1 documents, even though the service
> element is underspecified in that specification.
> 
> Use of the term "service" to mean something other-than, smaller-than,
> a-subset-of, related-to a web service is necessarily unreasonable,
> non-intuitive, and ... nonsense, in a word.  Making life harder for
> folks who have to train the folks who will be using WSDL ("Well, a
> service *element* isn't an actual *web* service.  It's ... umm, well, it
> may be a *part* of a web service, and we'll call that web service a
> "resource", so now we can find all the parts of a web service by
> relating them with a "target resource" attribute, but now we're not
> using the term "resource" in the same way that it's used in a URI or
> URL, so please ... make your mind a _tabula rasa_, if you would, and we
> will redefine all the words that we plan on using.") is probably not the
> ideal means of encouraging early adoption of the specification.
> 
> Now, in WSDL 1.1, portType <- binding <- service/port
> 
> In WSDL 1.2:
>   interface <- binding <- service/endpoint
>   interface <- service
> 
> No gain, just the introduction of redundancy, with no possibility of
> removing it (are we going to suggest that the relationship between
> interface and binding can be broken?  between binding and endpoint?).
> 
> Tfu.
> 
> Amy!

Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 11:27:24 UTC