Carl Lagoze <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The concept of recursive containers of arbitrarily
> complex, typed objects (possibly referenced indirectly) is a powerful
> abstraction that might be implemented in a variety of ways.
Agreed. This is, in fact, what SGML is for :-)
> - Now I will violate my first point. While I don't pretend to be an expert
> about SGML or MIME, my intuition is that both of these technologies are not
> sufficiently powerful to fully express the abstraction. I think for some
> relatively simple examples, SGML and MIME but be entirely appropriate. My
> prejudice, however, is to model this using CORBA or ILU and rely on the
> strong typing provided by the distributed object model.
The trouble here is that you're likely to end up with something that the
grass-roots barefoot-programmer software on the Web can't deal with.
Unfortunately, if that happens, we've failed.
E.g. Windows 95 doesn't come with CORBA, but it does come with HTML software.
I actually think that packaging objects up in any way at all is a little
risky, and that we should certainly allow a one-top-level-object-per-file
granularity for those people for whom it makes sense. It's the simple
cases that we have to solve. We're not reinventing a distributed version
or MARC here :-)
SGML does, however, have object types. It's not too hot on methods, but
it's not clear that many explicit methods are needed -- people will
interpret the data in the way that's most useful for their indexing software.
Lee
--
Liam Quin, SoftQuad Inc +1 416 239 4801 [log in to unmask]
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