Re: Moratorium proposal

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

So far, so good.  But the past month or so seems pretty good evidence that 
there is room for reasonable people to disagree about how to apply this to 
namespaces, languages, schemata, etc.

>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.

Yes, absolutely.

>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.

I am emphatically NOT suggesting an attempt to define what happens "inside 
the server".  What I do suggest is an attempt to build an abstract model 
that establishes some formal relationships between the key concepts 
introduced in the URI spec.

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Wednesday, 12 July 2000 05:04:09 UTC