Hi, On 7/10/07, Bertrand Delacretaz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Still (and I'm being slightly paranoid here, for the purpose of discussion), some of these meaningful path elements might change at some point.
I don't really see this as a problem.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] might get a new email...what happens? Worst case, his old email is made available after some time, and someone else grabs it (remember, I'm in paranoid mode ;-)
We can just rename the node, or if we don't care we can leave it as is. In any case I think it makes sense *not* to use the node name as the email address in an aplication. It's much better to put such semantic information in a property and keep the name as just a local identifier.
"Nelly Furtado" usually stays forever...though she might get married and change her name (not to mention the Wendy/Walter Carlos case [1]...or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince). New records will be released under her new name, but somehow a connection must be made to the old name, which would be easier with an abstract identifier.
Again, in this model each record should probably have a string property that contains the name of the artist.
What I'm getting at: meaningful paths are great, but when using them one must be prepared to handle edge cases where meaningful path elements change in the world that you're modeling.
I guess we need to make a difference between meaningful paths in the sense of "locally unique and readable" and the sense of "semantically valid" where someone would want to use the name itself as a specific attribute like name or email address. I much prefer treating names in the former sense. BR, Jukka Zitting
