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[Mike Champion] (Quoting Pat Hayes here)
> "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
....
>
>... 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.
I completely subscribe to the first story and I think that Pat Hayes is very
much on target about it's being the intent of Fielding-ites. At least, this
is the case for network-retrievable URIs.
I think that much confusion has arisen when non-retrievable URIs got into
the mix. On top of this, RDF uses the term "Resource" in a specialized way,
so that it does not really mean the same thing as a "resource" in the first
story. When a URI is non-retrievable and is used to "identify" something
non-retrievable - it may be the Yosemite valley or some intangible concept
or whatever, then there is no act of emitting a representation that is ever
going to happen.
The problem comes when someone who is used to thinking of a URI-identified
non-retrievable resource then start to think of a network-retrievable one
like Pat's Yosemite page. Automatically - and understandably - that person
will tend to think of the URI in the same terms as before. Thus, this
person thinks of the "resource" as being the "real" Yosemite, or the concept
of Yosemite, when it is actually is the thing (whose representation is) to
be emitted by the server.
Understandable, but not productive. The two are different things. Hats off
to Pat Hayes for laying it out so clearly.
Cheers,
Tom P
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