httpRange-14
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Mark Baker is the latest in a series to weigh in on the TAG issue regarding what a HTTP URI can identify.
I haven’t followed the debate closely, but it appears that the arguments haven’t changed substantively. Another way of stating this issue is asking whether a URI scheme fundamentally constrains the types of resources it identifies.
If you look at it that way, the scheme component of a URI is fairly special; it’s a declaration of support for a particular interface to the resource (in the case of http URIs, the protocol described by RFC2616).
Of course, this doesn’t constrain the nature of the resource itself; you could have an FTP interface to it as well, and/or a transporter beam interface (gotta future-proof this stuff, you know).
At the end of the day, however, those different interfaces to the same conceptual resource will have different URIs, because they have different schemes. Which raises the question - do URIs identify resources or do the really just identify discrete interfaces into them?
One Comment
Yves said:
Saturday, August 9 2003 at 7:43 AM