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On Sun, 26 Jan 2003 12:08:46 -0500, Jonathan Borden
<jonathan@openhealth.org> wrote:
>
> Roy Fielding has strong opinions on this, and I'd say that the success of
> Apache lends some credence to his _assertions_.
It's not hard to find Roy's assertions, and put-downs of "CGI cruft" that
violate REST. It's harder to find evidence that the sites build explicitly
or implicitly according to REST principles actually work better. Apache
(the software) happily supports both, nicht war? For that matter, if REST
principles govern the Web as we know it, why are application servers a
multi-billion dollar industry? Isn't their main point to bridge the
impedance mismatch between the stateless Web protocols and the highly
stateful back-end applications so that the world as a whole doesn't have to
rewrite everthing RESTfully in order to to work on the Web? (A real
question I don't know the answer to, not a rhetorical one).
>
> Have you read http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/ at any length? Is this useful?
I'd say that the Resource abstraction is a powerful one in the RDF
paradigm. The whole point is to make rigorous assertions about some
"thing" in relation to other "things". I have no problem with that. I
(along with the TAG, it seems) am not so sure that there is a close
alignment between the REST notion of a Resource and the RDF notion of a
Resource, however.
> . We use _empiricism_
> to find out that there is math going on that does not conform to the
> expected standards of math (vis a vie accounting) NOT to argue over the
> basic characteristics of math -- well the Enron and WorldCom folks are
> exactly trying to argue that - aren't they?
Hmmm. Interesting analogy ...The problem I'm pointing to is that the
"expected standards" in our world are still at the level of religion rather
than science. The definitions behind RDF and/or REST will be accepted when
and if the overall theories prove empirically powerful as the bases for
useful and efficient web sites and services. Until then, demanding
conformance with the definitions and theories by the authority of the TAG
or anyone else is both counterproductive and doomed to lead to the kind of
contention that we're seeing.
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