Re: Moratorium proposal

At 03:42 PM 7/11/00 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>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.

These are precisely the issues that make using URIs without any further
restrictions or specification about the relation of the 'resource' to
processing extremely dangerous, or at least an open invitation to
unpredictable behavior.

I tend to find predictability one of XML's better features.

>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.

So whose scope is it?  Does this imply that Namespaces in XML was reckless
for failing to specify further expectations?  Or that we should take
literal comparison at face value and assume that literals are all the
expectations we should have?

1700 messages later, we haven't reached genuine consensus on that last
question, so I don't hold out much hope for an answer.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

Received on Tuesday, 11 July 2000 21:16:38 UTC