On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 3:47 AM, Ben Companjen
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The URIs you gave get me to webpages *about* the Declaration of
> Independence. I'm sure it's just a copy/paste mistake, but in this context
> you want the exact right URIs of course. And by "better" I guess you meant
> "probably more widely used" and "probably longer lasting"? :)
>
> LOC URI for the DoI (the work) is without .html:
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79029194
>
> VIAF URI for the DoI is without trailing /:
> http://viaf.org/viaf/179420344

Thanks for that Ben. IMHO it's (yet another) illustration of why the
W3C's approach to educating the world about URIs for real world things
hasn't quite caught on, while RESTful ones (promoted by the IETF)
have. If someone as knowledgeable as Karen can do that, what does it
say about our ability as practitioners to use URIs this way, and in
our ability to write software to do it as well?

In a REST world, when you get a 200 OK it doesn't mean the resource is
a Web Document. The resource can be anything, you just happened to
successfully get a representation of it. If you like you can provide
hints about the nature of the resource in the representation, but the
resource itself never goes over the wire, the representation does.
It's a subtle but important difference in two ways of looking at Web
architecture.

If you find yourself interested in making up your own mind about this
you can find the RESTful definitions of resource and representation in
the IETF HTTP RFCs, most recently as of a few weeks ago in draft [1].
You can find language about Web Documents (or at least its more recent
variant, Information Resource) in the W3C's Architecture of the World
Wide Web [2].

Obviously I'm biased towards the IETF's position on this. This is just
my personal opinion from my experience as a Web developer trying to
explain Linked Data to practitioners, looking at the Web we have, and
chatting with good friends who weren't afraid to tell me what they
thought.

//Ed

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-24#page-7
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#id-resources