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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
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