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

Jan Algermissen writes:

> Not sure if this misses the point of you proposal, but it might be agood 
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.

Yes, excellent point.  I'll highlight that if we move forward on this.

Dan Connolly and I were chatting a few days ago, and he pointed out the 
relationship of this issue to our work on versioning and evolving 
languages.  I think your comment is another spin on that same issue:  one 
of the reasons receivers change, though not the only reason, is that the 
expectations for the languages or formats they will be processing evolve, 
perhaps due to incremental evolution of those languages or perhaps due to 
a wholesale change of the interface.  As you say, to the extent that a 
received message is self-describing, a receiver is in a better position to 
notice that it does not have what it's expecting.

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 14:36:40 UTC