RE: issue 168 proposal: xsi:type of external references in Encoding

As several have noted, your analysis is indeed right on the mark, and very
helpful.

>> 1a leads naturally to the idea that external and internal links should
be syntactically distinguished,

The tension seems to be this:  from a pure web architecture point of view,
efficiency and middleware architecture is not an issue, therefore do not
distinguish one link from another.  In practice, it's often nice to deal
efficiently with the special case of the closed graph that originated with
the sender, was intended to be "part of the message", and always travels
with the message.  Certainly, one will often wish to create middleware that
recreates the closed subgraph either in advance of invoking a receiving
application, or in some optimized manner.

Which in turn leads to the further question, if these links are
distinguished, distinguished how?  The IDREF suggestion essentially says:
only the potentially open graph references are true web-references; the
others use mechanisms private to XML.  I wonder whether there might be
another heuristic that might be applied, one which would differentiate
local references while unifying all references into a single URI-based
graph?   The rough idea would be:  "all graph references are represented as
href attributes which are URI references;  references to multiref targets
within the envelope SHOULD be relative URI's using fragment identifier
syntax and starting with the "#" (I.e. #someid).  These envelope-relative
references thus form a subgraph which is always known to be carried with
the message, and which in many cases can be decoded without further network
traffic upon receipt."

Does this make sense?

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Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Friday, 14 December 2001 22:15:59 UTC