- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 20:30:48 -0500
- To: skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com
- Cc: distobj@acm.org, "'John J. Barton'" <John_Barton@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, mnot@mnot.net, xml-dist-app@w3.org
Stuart Williams writes: >> If you then replace the human client with a >> program... it presumably needs to be endowed >> with some awareness of the signifcance of the >> resources it manipulates. +1, exactly! I think that's why GET can only "get" you so far in modeling the whole world. If you've got a human to figure out details of the contract, you can (appear to) leave a lot of it unspecified. To just tell machines to GET and PUT/POST each others properties, with no tighter contract than that isn't likely to work. As you say, the humans browsing a web don't treat all gets as polymorphic. A GET for a weather report URI is different than one for a stock quote. The context is determined by what they know, buy the positioning of links on pages, and yes, even by knowing the contents of otherwise opaque URI's. Things can't be opaque at every level, or they'd be useless. The question is, which levels of the system can look in, and which can't. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Mendelsohn Voice: 1-617-693-4036 IBM Corporation Fax: 1-617-693-8676 One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 6 February 2002 20:48:10 UTC