Also this is giving way too much credit for the creation of the URL. The format of the URL is not some miracle, genius insight. It is a natural result of network computing, and similar descriptors of how to find a file on a remote system had existed previously for ages.
I think something would have to be done with a bit more art and skill before I would consider it Socratic dialogue. This is just a clumsy blog post that is annoying to read, IMHO.
Obviously it wasn't that people couldn't figure out how to do that. It's that nobody understood that it was an important thing to be able to do. It seems really obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't.
Today, there still are a surprising number of people who create network-accessible persistent objects without making them URL-addressable. Apparently it's still not obvious to everyone that it's an important thing to be able to do.
Rohit Khare's article, "Who Killed Gopher?", helps to make the history a little clearer: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-http-gopher.html
rcp somemachine:/some/folders/somefile.txt
Is remarkably similar to:
http://somemachine/some/folders/somefile.txt
Don't get me wrong. The Web is one of the most important developments in the history of computing, or even of mankind.
But like I said, the original article makes the URL out to be some unique, genius invention that came out of nowhere. When in reality it evolved very naturally out of existing network computing practices.
Here's the clue that the article is wrong; when URLs came on the scene everybody who was using the internet at that time understood them intuitively. That's because they were a natural evolution of what was already there.
Of course, that's usually the case with just about anything people say is revolutionary and came out of nowhere. If you look at the actual context that the thing came from, there's a completely logical progression. It only seems like it came out of nowhere to people who weren't there.
cheers http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3396910 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186774
At least with link repetition I can quickly see whether I already read this and decide to ignore it. But re-posting an old, cancerously-grown comment with a new first paragraph is just mean and lazy.
Just rely on the upvoting system. If people think it is relevant, they upvote. This means things will only show up on the front page if enough people are interested (ie it has been long enough since it was last posted).
I believe that's wrong. From what I've seen, I think that that time is also a factor. After some amount of time, you can repost things with exactly the same link and title. And I believe that it's deliberate (the posts are likely to be new to many people since the population turns over to some degree after x amount of time).
Me: Hey, do you want to learn about a core principle of how the Web works? ;; Her: Huh? ;; Me: You know, the thing Facebook runs on. ;; Her: Oh right. No then.
It's lucky there are more interesting things than technology for us to talk about, thankfully! :-)
I don't think that exact conversation actually took place. My girlfriend would give me hell if I talked to her like that, I'm pretty certain.
As for the explanation, I like it. It puts into words what I had been intuitively thinking about the benefits of a RESTful API.
As a trivial example, consider that I have a blog located at the URIL http://www.example.org/posts/
If I were to offer an API to other developers, I would have two options: 1) serve posts as `application/json` at the URI http://www.example.org/api/v1/posts ; 2) serve both `text/html` and a `application/json` representations at the same URI http://www.example.org/posts , handling the desired mime-type and API version in the 'Accept' field of the HTTP request.
Which approach is better?
I get the "URLs are nouns" metaphor, but I don't think it needs any additional promotion or particularly favors HTTP over whatever else might emerge.
ontologies are data with corresponding metadata about everything on a domain or site.
These ontologies allow the data to be parsed automatically, i.e sites like amazon could just make their data available as ontologies and third party sites could "read through the sites for us". These third party sites serve as a portal from where we could ask for what we want and they would in turn look through the sites available (eBay, amazon etc) using the ontologies and get the best deal for us.
1. Cleaning 2. A coffee table 3. Shopping 4. A school
So was he explaining this to his wife in the 1970s? Because REST over HTTP didn't even exist until the 90s.
What browser does she use? It wasn't required to type that anymore for ages already :)
Second, this conversation seems to have been "enhanced" for the sake of the blog post, so it's quite possible that all the details aren't 100% accurate. Some of her questions seem a tad too convenient.
A highway is a type of road. As are streets, byways, lanes, courts etc... URLs need not be protocol specific, but having a standard makes inter-protocol communication that much simpler. In fact the post was primarily about how we label things (nouns, verbs etc...). I'd say most things fit the model of giving, taking and changing things, no?
