Web resource

The concept of a web resource is primitive in the web architecture, and is used in the definition of its fundamental elements. The term was first introduced to refer to targets of uniform resource locators (URLs), but its definition has been further extended to include the referent of any uniform resource identifier (RFC 3986), or internationalized resource identifier (RFC 3987). In the Semantic Web, abstract resources and their semantic properties are described using the family of languages based on Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The concept of a web resource has evolved during the web history, from the early notion of static addressable documents or files, to a more generic and abstract definition, now encompassing every 'thing' or entity that can be identified, named, addressed or handled, in any way whatsoever, in the web at large, or in any networked information system. The declarative aspects of a resource (identification and naming) and its functional aspects (addressing and technical handling) were not clearly distinct in the early specifications of the web, and the very definition of the concept has been the subject of long and still open debate involving difficult, and often arcane, technical, social, linguistic and philosophical issues.

In the early specifications of the web (1990–1994), the term resource is barely used at all. The web is designed as a network of more or less static addressable objects, basically files and documents, linked using uniform resource locators (URLs). A web resource is implicitly defined as something which can be identified. The identification deserves two distinct purposes: naming and addressing; the latter only depends on a protocol. It is notable that RFC 1630 does not attempt to define at all the notion of resource; actually it barely uses the term besides its occurrence in URI, URL and URN, and still speaks about "Objects of the Network".

...
Wikipedia