Bill's question on addressing inside a literal (was: EUREKA!!! (Or,in current lingo, OMG!!!) New XDI JSON serialization format

[Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org>]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Barnhill, William [USA] <barnhill_william@bah.com> wrote:

Nice work Drummond, a very interesting idea. I see it as an evolutionary path to go down from one of our early JSON formats, flattening our  {subj: {pred: [..],..},..} model to one level of keys through the use of XRIs such as =abc/() and the literal delimiter.  From an implementation perspective it is definitely easier. Also given any key you should be able to get the XRI identifier for a specific element, say the first, by appending !1, yes?  This means you could flatten it further to not have the arrays and simply be a key value store where we have the semantic value of XRI's within the keys. That would then fit nicely with the work I've been talking about in storing an XRI graph as KV pairs, where the key holds the XDI address, in a distributed hash table (DHT) such as TeleHash.

Bill, I finally got a chance to reply to this. I agree that having a way to address elements inside an XDI literal might be helpful -- but if they were XRI addressable, then they'd be in the graph, and not an XDI literal, no?

My sense is that a developer would use the XDI graph for as much addressability into the data as they want -- by "pulling" that data into the XDI graph -- and then use native addressing inside an XDI literal once they reach the actual literal.

This would suggest a clean line is always maintained between what's addressable in the global XDI graph and what's only addressable by some native addressing scheme inside an XDI literal.

Does that make sense?

=Drummond