¥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.