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Re: Re: Why REST

• To: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
• Subject: Re: Re: Why REST
• From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
• Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 14:24:00 -0500 (EST)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.2.20020218110754.01ce6b78@p...> fromSean McGrath at "Feb 18, 2002 11:33:04 am"

Sean McGrath scripsit:

> Its more than just time - all attributes of the observer (headers + body of 
> GET/POST for
> example) - effect the resource retrieved. The act of observing in effect 
> de-quantizining
> the URL. We cannot know the state of a resource without observing it and 
> the act
> of observing it can change the resource.

By no means.  GETs are allowed to be idempotent, which means that
the act of GETting cannot change the resource.  The entity body
may change for independent reasons: if I have a resource that
purports to return local time in Kathmandu, then every GET may
return a distinct entity body (defined as a sequence of bytes
plus a media type plus other metadata), but the *resource*
is the same, viz. the local time in K.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@c...
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_

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