Re: Late binding

Hey.  Redirecting to www-archive because I said I'd shut up. 8-)

On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 10:17:10AM +0100, Miles Sabin wrote:
> Mark Baker wrote,
> > The Web, on the other hand, assigns the number 1 to the "give you
> > something" operation, and everybody knows that,
> 
> So there _is_ a priori knowledge?

Not of the particular service, which is the context in which I've been
using the term.  Obviously some shared knowledge has to exist in order
for things to interoperate.

> You can ask for "something" and get it, yes. But what can you do with it 
> once you've got it?

Right.  I don't claim that either approach does anything special here.

But I will point out that HTTP permits a client to ask for a specific
format, and that there are several orders of magnitude less data formats
than there are possible methods.  Plus, data formats are standardized,
whereas methods rarely are.

> As far as I can see, all you've done is moved the uncertainty 
> (alternatively, the requirement for some kind of agreement or shared 
> understanding) from the invocation of an operation to the 
> interpretation of its result.  Can you persuade us that anything very
> much has been gained?

Intermediaries such as firewalls also understand what "1"/GET means.

> To me it looks like you're squeezing the semantic balloon in in one 
> place only to have it bulge out in another.

It's similar, but this game of balloon squeezing isn't zero-sum. 8-)

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

Received on Sunday, 30 June 2002 08:18:57 UTC