- From: Miles Sabin <msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 18:22:11 +0100
- To: xml-uri@w3.org
John Cowan wrote, > > You're missing a (subtle I grant you) contrast. A resource > > is _made_of_bits_, an entity body _is_ bits. > > I disagree. Some resources simply have no bits: a certain > brick in the foundation of my apartment building, e.g. Yet I > could devise a URI scheme for designating it: > > brick://us/ny/nyc/13%20%E.%203rd%20St.?side=east&course=11&seq=25 Point taken. I was equating 'resource' with 'electronically retrievable resource'. The latter are made of bits (or generated by non-abstract bit-generating processes). In any case your example hardly bolsters the claim that resources are abstract ... bricks are about as non-abstract as you can get. > > > A resource *is* abstract; the same resource can get a > > > different entity body every time you access it, e.g. > > > gopher://www.ccil.org:13/0. > > > > I'm afraid I think this is just wrong. Dereferencing that > > URL gets me a different entity body every time, but it's > > far from clear that it gets me a different resource. > > What I said: the same resource (viz. ccil's idea of the local > time), different entity bodies (at present, the octets 54 75 > 65 20 4D 61 79 20 32 33 20 31 33 3A 31 34 3A 31 32 20 32 30 > 30 30 0d 0a with media-type "text/plain"). Sorry, I misread. But, please, explain why you think the fact that a resource is made of different bits at different times (or, if you prefer, different entity bodies at different times) implies that resources are _abstract_? Lots of perfectly respectable things manage to have different constituents at different times yet manage to be non-abstract ... bricks for example. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)20 8817 4030 London, W6 0LJ, England msabin@cromwellmedia.com http://www.cromwellmedia.com/
Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 13:20:42 UTC