Re: [Plastic-devs] Select or show colums message

[Mark T. <m.b...@br...>]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, John Taylor wrote:

> Some things I haven't worked out yet:
> * if the fragment is going to appear in a UI, then it needs to be 
> human-friendly - so we should probably use the usual URI encodings for 
> whitespace etc http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/uri-spec.html ??
> * if the fragment is going to appear in a UI, then any 
> internationalisation needs to be done by the recipient changing the 
> fragments it offers according to locale

If we're processing URIs then yes we have to process %-escaped 
sequences as defined by the relevant standards.  However, especially
if we're thinking about internationalisation, I think I'd rather
see fragment IDs which are minimally human-readable 
("select_columns" etc) with some (optionally supported) messages
which translate these for presentation to users, e.g.

   String ivo://votech.org/info/message/getName( String msgIdIncludingFrag )
   String ivo://votech.org/info/message/getDescription( String msgIdIncludingFrag, String locale )
   String ivo://votech.org/info/message/writeMeAnEssayInLatinOnThisTopicPlease( String msgIdIncludingFrag );

etc.  In the case that these messages are not supported, the sending
application will just have to present the user with "select_cols".


> * if you've registered as understanding certain fragments, should the 
> hub pass you messages URIs that don't contain any fragment, or contain a 
> fragment you don't understand?  I'd say yes for the former and not sure 
> for the latter.  It might be safest just to say yes in both cases and 
> leave it up to individual apps to decide what to do.

think I agree, yes & yes.

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b...@br... +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/