On Dec 29, 2008, at 6:38 PM, Antony Blakey wrote:
On 30/12/2008, at 12:51 AM, Damien Katz wrote:
The current rule maybe not the most intuitive to a newbie, but it
is far more consistent and easier to work with then when using the
deeper APIs.
How is it 'far more consistent'. What measure of consistency are you
using? Name identity is more cognitively fundamental than name
contextuality. The consistency guaranteed by the asserting that a
name is a name is a name is of a more fundamental form than the
application of a different rule.
How is it 'easier to work with'? How does using _id and _rev
everywhere make it not easy? Surely it's not the difficulty of
writing code?
The only 2 other workable solutions I see is to either stuff
everything special into a _meta structure or only use HTTP headers
for all CouchDB meta information. But after having spent much time
thinking about this issue, I think the current rule is the better
compromise.
A simple rule is that every couch-domain value has a leading
underscore. All technical issues disappear. Consistency ensues. Any
objection to this must be aesthetic.
The current rule is that every couch-domain value has a leading
underscore when it appears in the root of a document. Your rule would
mean that throughout the API, everything that has special significance
should have an underscore. In views (key -> _key, value -> _value) in
urls ( GET /db/doc?_rev="...") and design docs (views -> _views, map -
> _map). That rule is simpler, but I think all the leading
underscores are ugly (aethetics) and require more unnecessary typing
(efficiency) and gain you no additional behaviors (functionality), and
all for the sake of consistency to a slightly simpler rule.
-Damien
