Explaining Roy Fielding's Dissertation to my Wife - Roy is to REST as Dizzy is to Bebop (theoretically)

My lovely wife Shannon is helping to do proof-reading on my book, and today she was working on the preface.

One of the things I talk about in the preface is about Roy Fielding, and how his dissertationis really a named codification of the architecture of the Web

She said to me "This really bugs me, why does someone get credit for just naming and distilling something that already exists"

I replied with "Well - naming things is important and he was part of the effort to create the thing (the Web) so he should get some of the credit"

She said "Hmm - I still don't get it, can you give me an example from outside of the world of technology"

I said "Imagine when bebop was being created as a genre of music. Think about Dizzy Gillespie, imagine he wrote a paper in about 1950 describing bebop, how it worked, and what went into creating it, and how to tell bebop from other forms of jazz based on chord structures, etc."

That made sense to her, so I thought I would blog about it.

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