Re: Very rough draft of TAG finding on self-describing documents

Noah,
 
On Monday, February 26, 2007, at 04:42AM, <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been interested for some time in doing 
>a finding on the importance of self-describing documents on the Web.

Not sure if this misses the point of you proposal, but it might be a good idea
to also mention that self-descriptiveness of messages is what protects the
sender of a message from an effect of change the receiver might go through.

Messages that are not self-descriptive depend in part on implementation of
the receiver. In an environment where there is no cenral control that keeps
the receiver from changing the client would never be able to independently
prove what it actually said when it sent a message.

This thread is a bit sloppy, but illustrates the point I think:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/message/7473

Jan



  In 
>fact, I started noodling on a draft over a year ago, then put it down for 
>awhile.  Now that Henry is working actively on XML Functions, I'm moved to 
>get back to this.  In short, I'm proposing that we do an overall finding 
>about the importance of self description, and point to Henry's work in the 
>particular case that what you've got is a representation of media type 
>application/xml.
>
>Right now, self-describing Web is languishing as a sub issue of the 
>all-purpose ultimateQuestion-42 [1].  I propose that we elevate it to a 
>full-fledged issue of its own, albeit closely coordinated with 
>xmlFunctions-34 [2].
>
>More to the point, this note is to announce a very, very rough sketch of a 
>draft finding on the importance of self-describing Web documents.  It's 
>publicly available at [3].  Please take a look.  I would like to devote 
>some time to exploring this at the TAG F2F in early March.
>
>Noah
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#ultimateQuestion-42
>[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#xmlFunctions-34
>[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments.html
>
>--------------------------------------
>Noah Mendelsohn 
>IBM Corporation
>One Rogers Street
>Cambridge, MA 02142
>1-617-693-4036
>--------------------------------------
>
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Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 14:26:01 UTC