

Re: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 18:39:15 -0400 (EDT)
cc: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>, "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, RDF-Interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0204191826230.29191-100000@tux.w3.org>

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> If you say that an HTTP header identifies a car, and then a GET returns a
> picture, how do you refer to the picture?

Tim, this problem is no different to those we run into with more
traditional http:-named informational resources. Representations are
transferred, either of informational or physical systems / entities.
Sometimes we don't have a URI name for each distinct bytestream
representation. Whether the representation is of a physical thing or not
is irrelevant to this problem.


If you say that an HTTP header (or http:-URIref) identifies a visual-work,
and then a GET returns an image/jpeg or image/png bag of bytes, how do we
distinguish between these three things? A partial answer might be
reference-by-description: 'the image/png representation whose sha1sum is

with criteria for splitting the world into two huge disjoint categories:
'things that can be named with http:-uris, and things that can't'? Sure,
the HTTP spec has woolly words about network / informational / resources
and/or services, but what inferences do such vague categories buy us?
Whatever happened to minimally constraining architectures...?

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 18:39:19 GMT
