We also believe that analyzing the body for rule matching is not that
a good idea, but we thought some folks would like to have the option
of doing so - that's why we defined IRML to allow for it. If general
consensus of OPES is that we do NOT need the feature, we should take
it out - it would simplify implementation of rule engines. Any
comments from others in the group? Would it be ok if we take these
out?
Well, in some of the work we are currently doing we certainly need to make
processing conditional on the existence of certain tags or embedded metadata
within bodies. However, I can see a strong case for restricting the top level
rule
language to only fire off header information and leave it up to the proxylet to
implement any body matching rules as part of its internal implementation. This
would be particularly powerful if the proxylet is free to add new pseudo-header
information which can in turn trigger other proxylets. In that case I could
implement a scheme along the lines of:
" if content-type is HTML then analyse-body-for-magic-tag.
...
if magic-tag is true then run-transformation-proxylet."
Dave Reynolds, HP Labs