This is a statement of achitectural principles behind my thinking on web design. This was the thinking behind the original HTTP content negotiation of 1992, and the vary= fields in the URI: headers for example. It has been behind W3C thinking on the OBJECT header for HTML and other issues. - TBL, 1996
This is an important axiom of web design, which must be understood for new designs to use URIs and HTTP properly. - TimBL, 2000
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Axioms of Web Architecture: 3
A URI represents a resource
A "resource" is a conceptual entity (a little like a Platonic ideal). When represented electronically, a resource may be of the kind which corresponds to only one posisble bit stream representation. An example is the text version of an Internet RFC. That never changes. It will always ha the same checksum.
On the other hand, a resource may be generic in that as a concept it is well specified but not so specifically specified that it can only be represented by a single bit stream. In this case, other URIs may exist which identify a resource more specifically. These other URIs identify resources too, and there is a relationship of genericity between the generic and the relatively specific resource.
As an example, successively specific resources might be
Each resource may have a URI. The authority which allocates the URI is the authority which determines wo what it refers: Therefore, that authority determines to what extent that resource is generic or specific.
This model is more of an observation of a requirement than an implementation decision. Multilevel gnericity clarly exists in all our current life with books and electronic documents. Adoption of this model simply follows from the rule that Web design should not arbitrarily seek to constrain life in general for its own purposes.
When we discuss electronic resources, an interesting fact is that a small number of dimensions of genericity emerge.
|Time||A resource may vary with time. For example, "The Wall Street Journal" varies with time. Each issue is a time-specific resource, which does not change with time. Most home pages on the Web change with time, in a less periodic way.|
|Language||When a document is translated, it is useful to be able to refer to it either in the generic, or to a particular specific translation.|
|Content-Type||A given resource may have mny ways in which it can be represented on the wire, using different Content-types (in HTTP terms). As an example, an image may be represented in PNG or JFIF format.|
|Target medium||A given resource may be targetted specifically to a specific medium, such as a printer, being displayed on laptop screen, being displayed on a cellphone, or being projected onto a large screen for an audience. (This is currenltly available for selecting CSS stylesheets, but is not done at the HTTP content negotiation level)|
The fact that there are such a small number of dimensions currently apparent sugests that Web software should handle them individually in its interface with the user, even though the architecure should handle them as a single concpet.
When a document is translated, one of the language-specific resources may have been the original source. However, this need not always be the case. Specific resources may have been derived from unrelated sources, or multiple sources. Therefore, though it is interesting to be able to describe the "derived-from" relationship, this is not part of the genericity relationship. It is not discused further here.
When making statements about resources, genericity leads two types of statement. The examples use imaginary HTML elements or HTTP headers as illustrations of the meaning.
A statement about the genericity of an object is important both for the user, and also for example for a cache manager. This statment takes the form of a list of dimensions in which the resource for a given URI is generic.
One proposal was the vary field in the URI: header in HTTP:
URI: http//foo.com/bar/baz vary=time,language
This is a statement about the relationship between the URI
and the resource. (See also Quality of service of names)
The other statement which can be made is about a genericity relationship between two resources. Typed links provide this kind of statement. One proposal was
<link rel="language-specific" href="baz.fr">
which means "This resource is a language specific version of this resource identified by baz.fr" This needs to be combined in with information about the particualar language.
<resource uri="baz.fr" vary="type, time"> <meta htp-equiv="content-language" value="Fr"> </resource>
So much for the architectural ideas. In practice one would use a shorthand form for all this information such as
<specific language="fr" uri="baz.fr"> or <specific language="fr" ct="text/html" uri="baz.fr.html">
There is now an RDF ontology for these concepts, http://www.w3.org/2006/gen/ont. The ontology does not describe the target-medium dimension. (Please use that instead of the old one desribed here in 2000-09.)
(c)Tim BL 1996