-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > > I've retitled this thread more meaningfully, and to summarize I'll > say that Oskar asked a question about whether field values ought to > be quoted when they represent strings, Scott added perhaps that they > should be typed explicitly, and I'm arguing against both. I didn't say they should be explicitly typed, just that they shouldn't be constrained to a single type. How that gets solved isn't really what I'm concerned about.
> Flexibility is the very purpose of text protocols--as soon as you deviate > from text, you have to worry about crap like byte order on different > machines, different floating point representations, different character > sets, different language bindings, etc. The Internet was build on text > protocols because that's the Lingua Franca that everyone can understand. > That's why XML is catching on like wildfire: it has the portability of > text with the added benefit of structure. Have you ever heard of network byte-order? Anyway, thats irrelevant. You need to be able to know the type of a field independantly of the protocol to switch to other protocols. You might, for example, want to map integer values (currently represented as strings) into binary values for the purposes of constructing ipx headers. Thats an extreme example, but *not all the world runs text*. > I find it particularly ironic that the idea of a Freenet->SMTP gateway > is being used to argue for de-text-ifying the protocol when SMTP is very > much text, and doing so will actually make such a gateway harder. We aren't saying we want to de-text-ify a protocol, only that a utility like a gateway shouldn't need to know the types of fields, for whatever reason. You're being arrogant if you claim to know all the possible applications of the freenet protocol. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE5HDzSpXyM95IyRhURAi+7AJ4wfZcz4iT4Qr05N4vL3Puj5RZ+CACcCHsn RZygD8tuXBLiTmX+jjke/t4= =fZN6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
