- From: <Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 12:48:26 PDT
- To: lawrence@agranat.COM
- cc: www-http-ng-comments@w3.org
You raise two points: one about the value of "loose coupling" between clients and servers, and the other about the value of human-readable wire encodings. I agree about the value of what you call "loose coupling". I think it is what I've been calling "anarchic evolution". That is, independently developed evolutionary changes to some existing application's network interfaces can be concurrently and incrementally rolled out into a widely deployed existing system. It's not quite correct to say that existing distributed system technology cannot facilitate this. While some people will argue that subtyping of object types suffices, I claim it doesn't do the job very well. Putting a property list in every type you want to be extensible does the job, but not very elegantly. I'm working on an idea I call signature extension that should provide a more elegant solution. I don't have a decent introduction or exposition ready yet, but you can find an out-take of a technical discussion of the idea on the PDG home page (accessible to W3C members only). On the binary-vs-text encoding issue, there is a lot of debate. There are worthy pro's and con's on both sides. I myself favor modular software architectures, enabling case-by-case selection of the best thing for the job at hand.
Received on Thursday, 20 August 1998 15:49:06 UTC