XML Events from a REST POV

Editors,

Steven cornered me (literally 8-) last night, and asked that I think
about XML Events from the point of view of REST[1].

REST is primarily concerned with software interactions over the network
rather than any particular markup language.  But it does concern itself
with the quality of resource representations in some ways.  For example,
it suggests that the main reason why JavaScript is more widely deployed
than Java is because JavaScript supports incremental processing[2]
(i.e. can be executed before being download in its entirety).  It also
suggests that being able to pre-layout tables and other components in
HTML helps *perceived* latency, which is as important to users as
managing network latency[3].

So with that concern in mind, I reread XML Events ...

There's certainly enough flexibility between target, observer, and
handler specification to permit a non-incremental processing friendly
document to be authored, but that's not a good criterion for evaluation.

When I look at the expected common use, I see that event capture and
processing will most likely occur in the same part of the document.
I also expect the second most common case to be where handlers are
specified towards the beginning of the document, in the same way that
many JavaScript developers place common code in the HEAD.  Both of
these usages support incremental processing.

With respect to perceived latency issues, I can't think of any issues
specific to XML Events.  I suppose that trying to use handlers for
events that refer to document initialization (like onLoad) would be
a bad place from which to set initial UI component sizes or do other
things that impact perceived latency, but that's not specific to XML
Events, nor have I seen that in common use in HTML.

Basically, thumbs up from me!

 [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
 [2] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluation.htm#sec_6_5_4_3
 [3] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluation.htm#sec_6_5_4_2

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2002 12:32:44 UTC