- From: Jean-Jacques Moreau <moreau@crf.canon.fr>
- Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 16:21:26 +0100
- To: Mark Jones <jones@research.att.com>
- CC: frystyk@microsoft.com, skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com, xml-dist-app@w3.org
Mark Jones wrote:
> Mark, I am wondering why (1) would have to know "about the semantics of a block" to do
> any sort of dispatching. After all, a Web browser does not know anything about the
> semantics of a particular MIME document, and is nevertheless capable of firing up the
> appropriate plugin. Why would block dispatching be different?
>
> Jean-Jacques.
>
> Some blocks will indeed represent declarative info. Other blocks,
> including RPC blocks, are best seen as encoding some kind of intended
> semantics (order a book from Amazon, etc.).
In my view of the world, the RPC Handler would deal with the RPC-related semantics ("oh yes, this is an RPC
block, let's call the appropriate function"), whilst the function itself would take care of the book-related
semantics ("let's order this book from Amazon"). But I guess I see choosing the RPC Handler in the first place
as purely syntactic (i.e. string matching on actorURI or blockTag).
> The processor determines
> a handler based on the block tag. My point was just that a processor,
> right out of the box, doesn't know anything about such mappings. It
> is only when a specific module is added to the processor, that it gets
> parameterized with this mapping. It is the module that inherently
> knows about the mapping.
We will probably need to settle on a shared understanding of what a module is... sometime soon! :)
Jean-Jacques.
Received on Tuesday, 20 March 2001 10:22:29 UTC