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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
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