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On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:52:35 -0400, Simon St.Laurent
<simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
> In case today's xml-dev didn't have enough political discussion of
> technical issues for you, may I strongly recommend:
>
> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/deviant.html
>
> The issues are URIs and RDF, and a whole lot more.
I also recommend http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
tag/2003Jul/0302.html (the latest major post by Pat Hayes in that TAG
megathread) as a very astute conclusion to the multi-year debate on
resources, representations, URIs, etc.:
"Let me illustrate the point with a simple example. If you click on
http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/Yosemite.html
your web browser will show you a picture of Yosemite valley ...
Now, there are two ways we could use the above vocabulary to talk about
this.
First story (based on my understanding of REST). The "resource" is an
idealized abstraction of this page on my server, thought of as a kind of
idealized Platonic document-in-the-sky (since this particular resource is
static) and the act of accessing it caused it to emit a representation ....
Second story (based on a logical semantics). The "resource" is Yosemite
valley; the representation is either the HTML source or the thing you see
on the screen - it doesn't really matter, in this story - and the
representation refers to, or denotes, the resource. ...
I suspect that the entire corpus of REST-inspired architectural documents
is written with the intended meanings used in the first story. Those words
are often read as though they had meanings along the lines of the second
story, however. Hence, I suspect, much of the confusion and debate. "
I gotta say that the whole idea of a "resource" as a thingie that emits
representations makes a whole lot more sense to me than "Web resources"
that are physical cars, distant galaxies, or abstract ideas.
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