On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 10:14:37AM -0500, Mike Champion wrote:
> Sure, no dispute there. The open question for me is whether "the Web as we
> know it" proves the concept of URL's that *locate* something or other to be
> determined by all sorts of context, MIME types, ad hoc conventions and out
> of band agreements ... or whether it proves the concept of URIs that
> *identify* abstract resources with representations. The former is much
> less general and abstract than the latter, and I'm skeptical of the
> argument that the success of the less general form proves the validity of
> the more general form.
That's reasonable, except for one thing; the more general form is
already a success. If you've ever used a firewall, you used the more
general form, because the client didn't have to do a gethostbyname()
(i.e. treat it as a locator) on the authority component of the URI.
The only place in *any* HTTP request-response chain that treats a URI as
a locator, is the next-to-last node, because it has to locate the last
node on the network. Every other node, including the origin server,
treats it as an identifier.
MB
--
Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
