William Vambenepe's blog

Recently I had a “petite madeleine” moment. I was sitting in my car listening to KQED on the way back from work and I remembered an interview of Tim Berners-Lee by Terry Gross on Fresh Air that took place in 1999. TBL was promoting his book, Weaving the Web. At that time I was very familiar with Web technologies (first Web site in 1994 and I had been writing Web applications as CGIs more or less non-stop since 1995) but I hadn’t realized that the URI was the key building block of the Web, way ahead of HTTP and even more ahead of HTML. I don’t think I had ever asked myself the question, but if I had I would probably have sorted them backward. Hearing TBL in this interview describe how, before the Web, people would create small files that described where to find information in a human-readable way (I assume it must have been something like “telnet to this machine, use this logon/pwd, go to this directory, start this application, load this file”) really made me understand the importance of this URI thing I had taken for granted for many years. To this day I vividly remember this interview and the Eureka feeling when I realized the importance of URIs as an enabler for the Web.

I don’t know if the fact that this interview, which was targeted at the general audience of All Things Considered (more used to hearing Jazzmen than geeks), taught a Web-head like me something important is a testament to TBL’s vision, Terry Gross’ skills as an interviewer or my stupidity for not having grasped such a basic concept earlier.

Going back to EPRs, what I was thinking recently is that these EPRs look a bit like the old “do this, do that” files that TBL talked about and that were replaced with URIs. Where “do this” becomes “put this header in your SOAP message”. Unlike the “do this” files, the instructions in the EPR can be machine-processed and that’s a key difference. But still, I can’t help getting this deja-vu feeling. Not that I have ever encountered these “do this” files myself but TBL made me see them one day in 1999.

[UPDATED 2008/10/22: Re-reading this three and a half years later, I realize I should have used the "URL" acronym in this context, not "URI".]

Related posts:

1. More on WS-Addressing EPRs
2. WS-Addressing EPRs are not identifiers
3. A flash of anti-genius
4. So you want to build an EPR?
5. That’s not an identifier. THIS is an identifier (say it with a Crocodile Dundee accent)
6. EPR redefining the difference between SOAP body and SOAP header

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2005 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Everything, Standards, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.