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Re: Re: Why REST? (RE: WSIO- With Name)

• To: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>,xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Re: Why REST? (RE: WSIO- With Name)
• From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 17:18:15 +0000
• In-reply-to: <3C694A28.31D6B5F3@p...>
• References: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E4306FEE84F@HQ5> <3C694A28.31D6B5F3@p...>

On Tuesday 12 February 2002 17:00, Paul Prescod wrote:

> An RPC interface does not have this property. At best Google can return
> a hyperlink to an end-point and human readable documentation about how
> you could write a Python program to access the data behind that link.

That depends what kind of RPC interface it is. RPC interfaces designed for 
distributed use, rather than in tightly defined systems, need not have that 
property.

> But Google can't read the human readable documentation so it can't
> follow that hyperlink. That service is a black-box to it. And even if it
> might have been useful to you as a human being, the chances are good it
> won't have an interactive interface either, because interactive
> interfaces are not trendy and cool like machine-to-machine interfaces.
> And buiding interactive interfaces on RPCs is harder than building web
> pages on top of XML resources, so people probably won't usually body.

Even ONC RPC has standard things that can be done to any RPC endpoint: you 
can query them to see if they're up, find out what program is registered on 
that endpoint, then try to find documentation based upon that program number.

> The first is the set of all documents on the Web indexed by Google that
> mention Len Bullard.
> The next is the home page for a pop star.
> The next is a movie about how the Python programming language brought a
> young couple together.
> The next is the middle of a transaction to buy airline tickets.
>
> How much more flexible do you expect URIs to be?

What is the URI of me? http://www.alaric-snell.com/ is the URI of an HTML 
page about me, not *me*. What is the URI of pain? What is the URI of the 
planet? Of the entire Internet? Let me lower the bar: What is the URI of the 
number 5?

We need more URI schemes that aren't resolvable :-)

On the other hand, this is the URI of my mobile phone:

urn:oid:1.2.826.0.1.4062548.2.0

It does not support GET.

>
>  Paul Prescod
>

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software  

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