On Fri, Feb 08, 2002 at 11:59:20AM -0500, Al Gilman wrote: > >I think it's much more than that; it's a resource that is the > >hierarchical root of all other resources made available by that > >authority. > > This is commercial custom but not part of the technical specification.
Sure it is; RFC1808. (and why just 'commercial' custom?) > Hierarchy in the namespace is a syntactic convenience as far as > URIs are concerned, the sense as nested contexts is a good guess > based on practice but not a requirement to use this form of URL. > Compare with URL-encoded script parameters that use path segments > rather than the searchpart syntax. The sense of the sequence of > path segments is at the discretion of the service offeror. Of course you can stuff anything you want in URIs; My site can be composed of http://www.mnot.net/asdbass/wef/awef/s/df/as/dfa/we/faw/sd/f/as http://www.mnot.net/aqgfawfa/awef/aw/faw/ef/asd/f/as/fa/wef/aw ... if I really want to. However, the Web is architected to take advantage of the relationships between resources and their subresources. > A collection of data which is excised from the assets on hand at a > server and dispatched to a recipient as a representation of "a > resource" needs more "packaging for delivery" than just the > Location reference. Anything from the context of that Location > that matters should be pulled into the packaging (SOAP envelope, > HTTP headers) as an explicit reference. Is the SOAP envelope becoming the de facto XML packaging mechanism? I've been wondering about this since XMLP started... -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
