04/01/03 19:07, Steve Harris wrote: > On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 02:51:13 +0100, Pascal Haakmat wrote: > > My proposal loses us nothing: because plugin authors need to use the > > PortName field to describe port values _anyway_ (to aid non > > RDF-capable hosts) it makes sense to agree on a best way to do it. > > I disagree, its an ugly hack, and I didn't want to do it in the first > place, there just wasn't much choice originally, and I got into the habit. > > People using eg. command line hosts could read the docs.
It's not an ugly hack. It doesn't break anything and it doesn't get in the way of anything, it doesn't prevent anything and it doesn't require anything. It's a good hack. I understand why you find it ugly, but it really isn't that bad. With my suggestion, the ugliness is conceptual: we're overloading the meaning of a field. This causes some heartache but little else. By requiring RDF the ugliness comes in the guise of extra complexity and the fact that we're dropping support for non-RDF hosts. That's like trimming your nails by chopping off a finger. I fully support the need for metadata a la RDF, but RDF is orthogonal to what I'm suggesting. There simply is no benefit to enumerating values using RDF versus enumerating them in the PortName. Pascal.
