[wsia-comment] Processing Model Considerations

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

First, no, I'm not even close to done with the Wolfram book, but it 
is clear that it is going to take longer than I thought, and given my 
own track record wrt getting back to unfiinished business, I decided 
to stay with the approach of annotating as I go, rather than pushing 
through a first reading to get the gist then going back for depth. 
That said, I can't let other work languish while I'm busy deciding 
whether this book is going to necessitate a change in my thinking or 
our work taken separately or together.

So, as we, in HumanMarkup, get ready to launch into Len's proposed 
experiment with a semiotic processor, I offer this article:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/13/processing-model.html

A question I think we need to ask is: Do we need to specify a 
processing order within a semiotic context for HumanMarkup in an a 
priori fashion for any application document using HumanMarkup?

I have long thought that some sort of preflighting of resources for 
any given application-specific xml operations on the web needs to be 
addressed even before or perhaps simultaneous with parser validation 
of a document invoking those operations. Our position on this needs 
to be noodled out before we start thinking about how or whether 
HumanMarkup-based or -supported applications documents SHOULD order 
parsing of applications document-specific operations.

In practical terms, what this means is that, for example, a web 
service being requested by an end-user needs to have all connections 
tested for reliability, security and availability before an 
end-user's HumanMarkup-enhanced personal preferences information is 
passed, and that needs to occur immediately after any single-sign-on 
identity authentication, which takes place first before a connection 
to a service is confirmed. I mention this in concrete terms so that 
we know that we are talking about clearly concrete issues, and not 
just a theoretical experiment. So, we need to cast the experiment so 
that it tells us the answer to these questions, in addition to more 
purely intra-HumanMarkup concerns.

I am copying this to the Web Services for Interactive Applications TC 
and my contact at HR-XML.org so that they know that these issues are 
being discussed here.

There are implications in these considerations as well for XMLP in 
the sense that whatever it turns out to be, we will need to make sure 
that our requirements for that protocol are made known.

Ciao,
Rex


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