Subject: Re: Notation data language

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 15:14:29 -0800

Here is the draft language:

   All undefined flags MUST be zero. Defined flags are:

       First octet: 0x80 = human-readable. This note is text, a note
                           from one person to another, and has no
                           meaning to software.

My interpretation is that this is not so much a guarantee that the data
is human readable, as that it is NOT machine readable.  In other words
the operational effect is that software should not try to interpret it.
It would be OK to have it be in some secret language that only one other
person could understand.  So on this basis if you wanted to put a URL
in there that would be fine, setting this flag just says that software
shouldn't try to parse and understand it.

Hal

---

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 18:54:07 -0500

> shouldn't try to parse and understand it.

Hmm.  I read this to say that the data was human readable in that it
could be shown to a human being without special processing (i.e. that
it was printable, and not a chunk of binary data).

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.

David

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