I agree with your sentiments Danny, fwiw. The current scheme is a
burden on publishers for the sake of a handful of applications that wish
to "refer to these information resources themselves", making them
"unable to talk about Web pages using the Web description language RDF".
What about minting a new URI at
"http://information.resourcifier.net/encodedURI"; or similar for talking
about such things? The service could even add value by tracking last
update times, content types, encodings, etc.
Jason
p.s. Don't bother criticizing the half baked idea, I thought about it
for < 10 seconds. The point is 100 alternatives could have been hashed
out in the time spent discussing and implementing http-range-14. Kudos
to google et al for ignoring it.
On 6/15/2011 9:27 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
On 13 June 2011 07:52, Pat Hayes<[email protected]> wrote:
OK, I am now completely and utterly lost. I have no idea what you are saying or
how any of it is relevant to the http-range-14 issue. Want to try running it
past me again? Bear in mind that I do not accept your claim that a description
of something is in any useful sense isomorphic to the thing it describes. As
in, some RDF describing, say, the Eiffel tower is not in any way isomorphic to
the actual tower. (I also do not understand why you think this claim matters,
by the way.)
Perhaps we are understanding the meaning of http-range-14 differently. My
understanding of it is as follows: if an HTTP GET applied to a bare URI http:x
returns a 200 response, then http:x is understood to refer to (to be a name
for, to denote) the resource that emitted the response. Hence, it follows that
if a URI is intended to refer to something else, it has to emit a different
response, and a 303 redirect is appropriate. It also follows that in the 200
case, the thing denoted has to be the kind of thing that can possibly emit an
HTTP response, thereby excluding a whole lot of things, such as dogs, from
being the referent in such cases.
Even with information resources there's a lot of flexibility in what
HTTP can legitimately respond with, there needn't be bitwise identity
across representations of an identified resource. Given this, I'm
proposing a description can be considered a good-enough substitute for
an identified thing. Bearing in mind it's entirely up to the publisher
if they wish to conflate things, and up to the consumer to try and
make sense of it.
As a last attempt - this is a tar pit! - doing my best to take on
board your (and other's) comments, I've wrapped up my claims in a blog
post: http://dannyayers.com/2011/06/15/httpRange-14-Reflux
Cheers,
Danny.
