Re: Moratorium proposal

> I imagine something
>that is much more explicit about the properties of and relationships
>between resources, URIs, entities and any auxiliary concepts

By definition: An absolute URI identifies a resource. A resource is an
abstract point in  absolute URI space.

What you can do with that resource isn't actually defined by the URI spec
-- or, indeed, defined very well anywhere. How you can talk to it is
supposed to be defined by the part of URI space that the resource occupies
-- in specific, the scheme prefix it uses. If you see a URI starting with
"http:" or "ftp:" or "mailto:", that's a strong hint about what network
operations are performed when you attempt to dereference this URI, and what
the outermost layer of protocol wrapped around the data will look like.
Note that schemes are defined seperately from the URI spec per se.

But that's about as far as the architecture goes. What's actually happening
inside the server (if it even exists!) when you issue that transaction is
entirely up to it. If it returns different results each time, or different
data for each user, or keeps an access count or other side-effect data,
that's up to it and is out of the scope of the URIs and schemes.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Tuesday, 11 July 2000 16:00:24 UTC