Re: Dynamic invocation vs. late/dynamic binding

----- Original Message -----
From: "James M Snell" <jasnell@us.ibm.com>
To: "Walden Mathews" <waldenm@optonline.net>
Cc: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>; "Sanjiva Weerawarana"
<sanjiva@watson.ibm.com>; <www-ws-arch@w3.org>; <www-ws-arch-request@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: Dynamic invocation vs. late/dynamic binding


> Just a few drops of milk left.  The question is one of *meaning*, not of
> *substance*.  Of course it's still a cow, but that is only meaningful if I
> know what a cow is in the first place.

Maybe you don't know what a cow is.  Maybe if milk is all you're after,
it doesn't matter if it's a cow or a goat or a supermarket.*  You can always
push the level of abstraction one level and re-voice your objection there.
No one is saying that you can do business with no assumptions whatever;
the idea is that you can accomplish plenty sans full specifications of the
parties involved.  It's the partial specification thing, even if Mark Baker
says
it's not.

* If you ask me how to milk a supermarket, I'll say "mu".

>
> Let's take a more practical example.  In an HTML form, why do we
> distinguish between an <input /> and a <textarea /> ?  They are both
> intended for collecting arbitrary text data of variable length.  It's not
> the *substance* of the tag that is important, it's the *meaning* of the
> tag.  One tag allows us to provide a single line of arbitrary text, the
> other allows us to provide text that includes line breaks, etc.  The
> browser, conforming to relevant specifications has a priori knowledge of
> the meaning of an <input /> tag vs. a <textarea /> tag.  The browser would
> never know what to do with those tags given nothing but their substance.
> Since it the browser understands the differences the tags meaning, it
> understands exactly what it needs to do when it encounters either of them.

One man's "<textarea />" is another man's tag.  Why must every party be
burdened with the greatest level of detail we can muster in our descriptions
when they don't care?  The freedom to not care is what's on the table here.
Meaning exhibits at all levels of abstraction.

>
> Dynamic invocation and late/dynamic binding both require a certain amount
> of a prior information to assign context to the data and processes that
> are being dynamically invoked or bound.

A certain amount, depending on the task at hand.

Walden

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 21:36:44 UTC