Subject: Re: Notation data language

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 15:58:08 -0800

David Shaw writes:
> As I see it (and this departs from the language in the draft), being
> human readable shouldn't necessarily mean that the data cannot also be
> machine readable.
>
> To use the URL example, if there was a "[email-masked]" name
> (to use the proper user name space from the draft), and that was
> defined as a URL for my home page, I don't see any particular reason
> why a machine shouldn't process such data - the processing function
> would be keyed off of the "name" value, so the program would have a
> pretty good notion of what was going to be present in the "value"
> field.

Instead, I would handle this by not setting the human-readable flag, and
instead choose a name for the notation which tells the machine that it
is a URL.  Then the software can know that URLs can be safely displayed
to a human.  Leaving the human-readable flag clear allows the software
to read and try to understand the notation.  Nothing prevents it from
displaying it to a human if the semantics of that notation imply that
it would be reasonable.

Hal

---

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 19:20:05 -0500

> displaying it to a human if the semantics of that notation imply that

Yes, that would work as well.  Still, I think that allowing the
implementation to look at human-readable notations is more flexible in
that a new notation tag can be at least partially supported without
code changes.

If human-readable meant printf()-able, then the code could just
display anything that had the human-readable flag set so at least the
user could see the notation and thus have partial support for the new
tag.  The software implementation could not handle the notation
without a upgrade, but I suspect that while automation is nice, many
notations could be handled by a user as well (for example: "This key
is revoked, please use key 0xXXXXXXXXXX instead").

David

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David Shaw          |  Technical Lead
<[email-masked]>  |  Enterprise Content Delivery
617-250-3028        |  Akamai Technologies