Continuing the $is discussion

[Markus Sabadello <markus.sabadello@gmail.com>]

During the last XDI2 and XDI TC calls, we considered how $is relations should behave.

One idea was that on the server side there could be a distinction between "public" and "private" links, or between "transparent" and "opaque".

Another idea was that a client could qualify its operations to request "expanded" or "compressed" responses.

I tried to summarize a few variants here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgNBumZ7dHSSdC14cmNieUgtLXA3QVR5SzFTcmxoV3c#gid=0

The ideas there are that...

- $is would be a "public" / "transparent" link, i.e. visible to clients

- $is! would be a "private" / "opaque" link, i.e. not visible to clients

- $get would tell the server not to treat $is in any way special

- $get* would tell the server to follow $is links and return an "expanded" response

- $get! would tell the server to follow $is links and return a "compressed" response

I did an experimental implementation of this, just to see how it could work..

http://xdi2.projectdanube.org/XDITestLocalMessenger

Not sure if all this functionality is required, or if the defaults should be different, or if the $is and $get qualifiers should be named differently.

But I hope this can help continuing the discussion..

Markus