¥Understand ÔaccessÕ as
inclusively as possible, so this includes uses of an IRI to
access a website, an http endpoint, a ÔrepresentationÕ (in the REST sense)
of a resource, a server, a file, an html page, a mailbox, a webcam, É anything
at all that can receive, send or be directly influenced
by, or indeed itself be, any piece of information that can be
transferred
by a transfer protocol, either now or in the forseeable future.
¥Cast this net as broadly as you
like, the accessible things will always be an
extremely small subset of the set of all things that can be referred
to. Moreover,
although one can of course refer to accessible things, most
acts of reference will be to things not in this
class, because most of the worldÕs business is concerned with
other things than the architecture of the internet. (Example: the weather in
Oaxaca.)
¥
¥Historical note: the word ÔresourceÕ meant Ôaccessible
thingÕ in the early writings of Engelbart and others.
This corresponds fairly accurately to the English meaning of ÔresourceÕ, unlike subsequent
W3C usage. The newer notion of Ôinformation resourceÕ might be
similar to Ôaccessible thingÕ, but it may be narrower.