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Re: more politics

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: Re: more politics
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 21:53:58 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <oprssgstsbezizxn@s...>
• References: <r02000000-1026-BC099F40BD6811D7A0870003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]> <oprssgstsbezizxn@s...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

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

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: more politics
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>

• References:
  • more politics
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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