Paul Harrison wrote:
> 2. DataObjectReference type contains the idea of a name (expressed as
> a string) and a container that the Object lives in - I am not sure
> that this distinction is still needed now that we have some consensus
> on the vos: URL scheme, as it has built in semantics for expressing a
> container.
The original definition for a node did have both the name and the URI.
The reason was that the URI would be encoded (space = %20 etc.), and the
unencoded name was provided to make things easier to display things in a UI.
Having talked with UI developers at Canada, it was decided that
providing the name as a plain string was duplicating data and wasn't
required anyway.
So, server responses do not need to include the name, just the URI.
However, when creating a new node, it was agreed that the client would
supply the name as a plain text string, and the server would convert
this into the URI encoded identifier.
This means that the server side code does the URI encoding, making it
easier to verify that we get it right.
The operations that create a new node (CreateNode, PushDataTo and PullDataTo) take the name of the new node, not the identifier. This gives us a way of distinguishing between import into an existing node (node URI) and import into a new node (node name).
The distinction still isn't as clear as I would like, but that is what
is in the current document.
If we want to change this, then we will need to modify the document.
Dave Received on 2006-06-14Z14:02:09