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Mike Champion wrote:
> Pat Hayes wrote:
> "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. ...
[By the way: I don't think these stories capture either TimBL's or Roy
Fielding's world-views very accurately; but I digress].
OK, I have a question. How would you, given the existing deployed Web
technology, be able to distinguish which of these two stories are true?
I don't think you can. I think that the notion of what a resource "is",
while interesting, is a human kind of thing that the Web doesn't really
have a useful way to talk about, and has no observable effect on any
software that I'm interested in either using or building. As a result,
I am, at the moment, equally unconvinced by Pat Hayes' resort to
linguistic semantics (perhaps only because I am poorly educated in it)
and TimBL's views on the special status of HTTP URIs and the role of the
#-mark.
> 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.
Well, you're on solid ground. A resource is identified by URI and may
emit representations. There's no way to tell from the representations
what the resource "is"; I tend to believe a resource is what its
publisher says it is as a good rule of thumb. But it doesn't affect the
software very much. -Tim
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