Damned mailing lists...you can't remove things you wish you hadn't said. Accountability's overrated. ;-)
- Miles
Miles Elam wrote:
Justin Fagnani-Bell wrote:This is definitely where we differ. I don't see why an intrinsic resource should always end in a '/'. If /a/b.pdf is the PDF representation then why shouldn't /a/b be the intrinsic resource? The only reason I see why the trailing slash is recommended is because developers are used to having their URI space tied to their filesystem structure with a static server like Apache. The trailing slash, from our experience with filesystems, indicates that something is a directory, that it has children. But in a URI a resource can be both a viewable resource and a container node at the same time. There's certainly nothing stopping /a/b/, /a/b, /a/b.pdf and /a/b/c.pdf from all being valid URI's in the same space. To me the trailing slash simple indicates that there's more to come at lower levels, and the absence of it means the resource is a leaf.You're right in that it is what we are used to but not necessarily because of the filesystem. I misspoke in this case where /a/b could indeed be a resource in some cases. One major problem lies in clients like IE (for better or for worse the dominant viewer) which don't always behave correctly even when the correct MIME type is sent. The other is when the resource references other resources.
Take a web article by Oreilly for example. These articles have images, multiple pages, talkbacks, etc. If /a/b is the intrinsic resource, how do we logically access the first figure in that article? How do we access the third page? Aren't multiple pages just another representation of the resource? PDFs can encompass multiple pages. A web page made for printout would encompass only one long page. Would it be /a/b/printable.html?
Is one more correct than another? I don't think so -- it seems to come down to personal preference, all other things being equal. I think IE would have fewer problems with the slash. I personally don't view the trailing slash as a directory but as a resource collection. Perhaps a collection of representations? But that's just semantics and I'm grasping here.
In the example of the Oreilly article, I think that there is more to come at the lower levels, there is no absence of lower levels when representations are considered lower levels, and that it's a node and not a leaf. I can only think that a resource would be a leaf if it and its siblings never have inline constituents like images, multiple pages, plugins, etc..
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