Ian Hickson wrote:
On Wed, 9 Dec 2009, Dan Connolly wrote:
I find that usage of "identify" very unappealing. I think normal usage
of "identify" is unambiguous. If I say "In this game, teams are
identified by color" and then told you that blue identifies team X and a
different team Y, you'd consider that nonsense.
Yet that's exactly what happens. You play a game of Carcassone with me and
Dom, and Green represents me. Yet if one hour later you play the game
again but with Mike and Doug, suddenly Green might represent Mike instead.
The colour here is an identifier, but what it identifies changes
discretely over time. The color is a URL. The player is a resource. In the
The person is a resource. The player identified by Green is a resource.
They are not necessarily the same.
rules it refers to "the green player", just like we refer to "the
http://google.com/ page", without meaning a particular bag of bits. Yet
In this case, "we" excludes me. When I say that, I do *not* refer to a
particular bag of bits.
when you are playing the game, if you say "the green player" you mean the
actual person, just like we refer to "the http://google.com/ page" as
meaning the exact bag of bits. The two usages are trivially
distinguishable by context.
Just like a variable whose value is an object is used simultaneously to
refer to whatever object it points to, which can change over time, and the
actual object that it points to at a particular moment in time.
I don't think I've ever come across anyone trying to try to distinguish
these two concepts before reading the HTTP/URI specs, and I don't think
I've come across anyone trying to distinguish them since outside of people
involved in the development of those specs or people close to them.
If you want to maintain the notion of "a resource is a bag of bits" it
would be helpful if you'd describe how this definition helps in
explaining when you POST to an HTTP resource.
Best regards, Julian
