[topicmapmail] Web Services

[Murray Altheim]

Jan Algermissen wrote:
> Murray Altheim wrote:
>[...]
>>Do people have to be aware of the list of IDs, or does 
>>the system just fail when either an expected ID isn't there, or
>>when an inserted ID fails because it's already in use (or there is
>>an error because of that ID). 
>
> IMHO using element IDs for other referencing purposes than for reconstructing
> the serialized graph are a bad choice anyway (as are PSIs that contain fragment
> identifiers) due to the limitations they introduce when used over HTTP....

Hmm. I'm confused about that last statement. If I publish a Topic
Map as a source of PSIs, or an XHTML document that references an
XTM document acting as that source, either way I have a single
XTM document containing multiple <topic> elements, where each is
potentially the Topic "behind" that the published PSI. I do this
because the PSI is yes, just a string, but the Topic is perhaps
firmly interwoven in a lattice of relations that might be important
to my processor. So those fragment IDs are important to me. Being
over HTTP or not doesn't seem to make a difference here. It's a
reference on a local file system too.

>> There may be other XML issues, but
>>I'm guessing some are fairly easy to deal with (such as requiring
>>all incoming and outgoing content be in UTF-8).
>
> Why that? Isn't the encoding attribute/HTTP header part only a hint
> for the processing application? What do you mean?

A "hint" is perhaps putting it a bit mildly, though I know that
word isn't your invention. If I have two or three XTM documents
that have different encodings, I'm going to have to convert them
all to a single encoding in order to merge their contents, for
example, a Microsoft encoding, a Shift-JIS encoding, UTF-8 and
UTF-16 big-endian. I'd probably convert everything into the latter.
Absent the UTF-16, I'd probably go with UTF-8. Point is, I don't
think you can just ignore this, unless you don't care about the
actual display and interpretation of content.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

  "[The Bush Administration] criticises the focus on good and bad
   food, saying it has not yet been established what acceptable
   levels [of sugar, salt, and fat] should be. [...] And in the
   UK, the Food Standards Agency has warned that poor nutrition
   and lack of exercise means young people today on average are
   likely to live shorter lives than their parents - the first
   such reduction in more than a century."
   US questions global obesity plan, BBC News.
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3401715.stm

   The FDA Recommended Daily Allowances for sugar, salt and fat have
   been part of the mandatory labeling laws in the US for decades.