ietf-openproxy
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Re: comments on draft-beck-opes-irml-02

2002-03-19 09:07:54

Hmmm...

I'm not familiar with this IRML work, but the keywords "matching" and "logic" suggest there may be some similarities with the content negotiation work in RFC 2533. We used an LDAP-based syntax, but XML could work just as well -- it's all just s-expressions, isn't it?

#g
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At 07:03 PM 3/18/02 -0800, Mark Nottingham wrote:


On Thursday, March 7, 2002, at 01:14  PM, Andre Beck wrote:

Match seems to have the beginnings of boolean logic embedded; I see
AND (multiple matches specified) and NOT (not-matches) and even OR
(just flattened out to multiple rules). IMHO It would be good if
this were explicit; e.g., <and> ... </and> <or> ... </or> <not> ...
</not> wrappers around matches.

We tried that when we first came up with IRML, but it get's really messy
if you have a lot of conditions.

Messy in what way? If you mean 'looks/reads messy', I'd ask whether IRML is supposed to be primarily human-readable or machine-readable. Ideally, of course, it would be both, but IMHO a machine-unambiguous representation is better if you have to make a tradeoff; it can always be presented or transformed to a more human-palatable form. Directly expressing the boolean logic gives the most clarity and flexibility in the rules; implying it leads to a less capable and more ambiguous format, IMO.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK(_at_)NineByNine(_dot_)org>