On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Norman Gray wrote:
> > An alternative would
> > be to introduce a new message with the semantics "here is a table
> > containing polarimetry data - do something with it if you want".
>
> I haven't kept up with PLASTIC, so I'm not really qualified to
> comment on its aesthetics, but... ugh! Isn't that legitimising all
> sorts of nasty namespace-pollution?
I don't see where namespace pollution comes in.
> It sounds much neater for an
> application which gets a broadcast OpenURL message to just look at
> the file and see if it can do something with it.
I'm not sure why you think this. One major disadvantage is that
the table might be large, and you don't want to acquire and parse
the thing only to find that it's of no use to you. A related
consideration is the explicit (I've just designated it so -
http://eurovotech.org/twiki/bin/view/VOTech/PlasticManifesto)
goal of PLASTIC that processing of messages should be made as
easy as possible for application authors.
> This would
> genuinely be UTYPEs driving processing, and the Right Thing, and very
> webby.
Buzzword compliance is not an explicit or implicit goal of PLASTIC design.
To put it another way, at least in its current phase, PLASTIC
has concerns much nearer the pragmatic than the theoretical end
of things.
Mark
--
Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
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