RE: Efficacy of rule specification, processing

Two points regarding Hilarie's example here:
1) Currently IRML does not let the rule engine parse the data (like
html/xml) itself. It only parses the html headers. The sole reasoning behind
it is for performance and simplicity. We feel like the service itself would
deal with the data, not the rule engine.
Maybe people are not aware of that limitation. So it is good time to reflect
on it. How do people feel about that? 
2) IF the rule engine does parse the content, then you don't really need to
define a variable per say for the example of "has-an-xml-phone-number-tag"
-- you just set up a rule to find the <phone-number> tag in the XML data
body. Regular expression matching can easily satisfy that. No need to
additional variable.
Lily

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hilarie Orman [mailto:HORMAN(_at_)volera(_dot_)com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 10:46 AM
> To: hofmann(_at_)bell-labs(_dot_)com
> Cc: ietf-openproxy(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
> Subject: Re: Efficacy of rule specification, processing
>
>
>
> The question is, how much shared computation can be done
> before dispatching to the individual services?   Where rules
> have common variables, it makes sense to share.  If a common
> variable can be introduced, through, for example, content
> parsing, then it makes sense to expose this to the rule
> evaluation engine.
>
> Now, I further claim that services should be allowed to
> introduce components that define and set variables for
> the rule engine.  An example is an XML parser.  That
> should be allowed to set variables like 
> "has-an-xml-phone-number-tag".
>
> Hilarie