Re: "hypertext"

Hi Mark,

On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 01:31:44PM -0400, jones@research.att.com wrote:
> It seems more flexible to think of "hypertext" as returning some view
> of an object.  If you wanted, you could objectify the views I suppose
> and then think of those as the objects that you were referencing, but
> this would tend to obscure (for good or bad) the relationship of the
> view to the entire object.

Right, it does obscure it.

> The common use of GET for queries heads in this same direction.
> A query result is a subset (or view) on the entire database
> being gotten.

Sure, but I'd say that a queried subset is different than a view,
because the query is explicitly not asking for a representation of
the full state.

But no matter, there are certainly multiple valid ways of looking at
this.  I was just presenting one that I thought would appeal to most
Web services people with a preference for an OMA-like architecture,
since the Web really is a distributed object architecture.

> URL's that point to a fragment or position in a document are
> another example of subsetting or modifying an object reference.
> </maj>
> 
> 	So it doesn't in any way constrain what can be represented (all
> 	objects can be pickled).  Nor does it constrain the consumer of that
> 	information to requiring a human process it (that depends on the
> 	specific form of serialization; HTML for humans, RDF/XML for
> 	machines).  It only constrains the way in which the information is
> 	made available; through a generic method invoked upon an object
> 	identified by a URI.
> 
> <maj>
> Can you define "pickled" for me?

"Serialized", like Java serialization; snapshot the current state of the
object to a byte stream.  AFAIK, the term came from Modula 3.  Python
uses "pickle" too.  I use "serialize" and "pickle" interchangably, to
try to speak to those who may have used one term but not the other.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 14:16:33 UTC