Geoff Howard wrote:
Exposing Resources ------------------
I'm adding this because my brain is still a little unsure about this. So far, we've said that file resources (an xsl for example)
1) need to be exposed via a sitemap pipeline, even if only by a reader
2) are not anywhere declared explicitly (except in the pipeline of course)
3) are not distinguised from resources meant to be private by any formal semantics, though this information could be conveyed human-to-human in any block docs (blocs? blockumentation? ;) ).
Here are my oustanding questions:
- Will we regret requiring the overhead of pipeline setup (runtime I mean) for blocks which expose a great deal of otherwise static resources?
- Not found resources will have to go through every pipeline to determine that it's not found. With fallback behavior due to polymorphism this gets worse.
- Will not explicitly declaring which resources are meant to be public cause trouble for block implementors and extenders?
If a block provides resources (e.g. an XSL file) it also implicitely provides a contract for the use of this XSL file. This would be an XML document conforming to a certain schema (no matter if xsd, dtd, rng, ...).
Until now I've not understood how you can describe this contract. Is it something we want to take care of now, or do we extend the explicit contracts, when we have some experiences with blocks to know how to deal with this issue.
This can also affect other resources too:
If you provide a skin block which another block extends, how can you make sure, that the logo has the size 80x80 pixels?
There are surely many areas where it might make sense to explicitely describe those contracts, but I fail to see, if this is planned nor if we should take care about this now.
Some enlightement would be appreciated.
Bye,
Andreas Hochsteger http://highstick.blogspot.com/
