Re: A "processing model" proposal

/ Richard Tobin <richard@inf.ed.ac.uk> was heard to say:
|> So is the following generalization sufficient?
|> 
|> Where I had one anonymous infoset, you propose a list of anonymous
|> infosets. Each step consumes all of them (perhaps by ignoring some of
|> them) and produces zero or more.
|
| Provided that you allow for the multiple output infosets from one step
| may be consumed by different steps. 

Do you mean if you label them, or do you somehow want the anonymous
ones to float around?

I have no problem with:

  <p:stage name="someFunkyThing">
    <p:output name="p1"/>
    <p:output name="p2"/>
  </p:stage>

and then some other stages later on:

  <p:stage name="someOtherFunkyThing">
    <p:input name="p1"/>
  </p:stage>

  <p:stage name="someOtherOtherFunkyThing">
    <p:input name="p2"/>
  </p:stage>

But I think it'd be a bit hard to explain how one stage might consume
one of three anonymous inputs such that the other two might
subsequently be consumed by other stages.

| I also want a single output to be
| connectable to multiple steps' inputs, but we could have (conceptually
| at least) a "tee" component that produces multiple copies of its
| input.

I think that's fine as long as they're labeled. I think we should make
infosets immutable. That is, a process can transform A to produce B,
but A still exists and hasn't been changed.

|> You also have "local names" which I'm on the fence about, but I think
|> that's a seperable issue.
|
| The local names are merely a mechanism to allow the graph to be
| represented in XML; they are irrelevant to the processing model
| itself.  I think we should explicitly separate the processing model
| from the XML representation of the pipeline: the XML document
| represents a graph of steps, and the processing model describes how
| the graph is executed.

I hear you.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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