[uf-rest] Introducing JAHAH

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Bob,

On Jan 5, 2006, at 8:40 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On Jan 5, 2006, at 8:24 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>>
>> One of the things about microformats (in case you hadn't learned  
>> how the game is played here :-) is to try to follow existing  
>> conventions as much as possible.  In this case, I started with Mac  
>> OS X plists, and moved to XML Schema Datatypes:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-datatypes
>>
>> Yes, it is somewhat complex, but it is a well-defined standard.    
>> I'm certainly open to doing something simpler, but I'd want to  
>> have some reasonably strong precedent, so it doesn't just become  
>> personal taste.  I do like the idea of defaulting to a generic,  
>> high-precision 'number' class, especially since it is easy to  
>> specialize using multiple classes.
>>
>> I personally like the Mac OS X plist typing (number, data, etc.),  
>> but I don't know if that's normative enough to drive a web standard.
>
> Personally I think it should be the simplest thing that could  
> possibly work.  Isn't that the idea behind microformats?  If  
> someone wanted to play the XML game, they would...

Yes, I'm a big fan of TSTTW. :-)   The problem is, the more one  
deviates from standard practice the less certainty there is for the  
result.  Thus, a tension between doing something that I (or you)  
perceive as simpler, and something that is easy to converge around.

The ideal, IMHO, would be if we could find a reasonable set of  
datatypes that was simpler than XML Schema, but  more neutral than  
Mac OS X plist.   Something like C would be ideal, but has no datetime..

That's why we need a wiki page for, to start collecting the standard  
types used in various languages and systems, to see if we can find a  
common ground...

-- Ernie P.