On Jul 29, 2011, at 12:06 PM, Markus KARG wrote:
>>
>> Do you have some cycles to put it in wiki form?
>
> Do you think it is worth the effort? I mean, it seems that my proposal has
> no majority anyways.
It's up to you, I think it may help getting everyone on the same page.
>
>>
>> So you get a representation with URIs and resolved them eagerly before
>> the application gets to the parts? I thought the whole point was to
>> resolve the parts _on demand_. That's certainly what a browser would
>> do. I fail to see the value of this approach. Could you explain?
>
> Yes, the representation is using relative URIs to reduce message size, and
> the unmarshaller is eagerly resolving those so the JAXB instance will be a
> fully useable document. The reason is that the proposal is about structural
> links only, and in our experience, most links are actually followed rather
> soon. Our test users told us that they rather like to have a document to
> edit which already contains all references, so they later can drop the LAN
> cable and use the document locally (our customers are not always online as
> they are not typical office users but mobile workers). If we would use on
> demand resolution this would not work obviously but it enforces always
> online use mode (which is a problem for our customers). Another negative
> effect of on demand resolution is that the data used by our customers is
> rather "tightly bound" and the test users didn't like that the referenced
> data has changed since downloading the master document; they liked it more
> to have some kind of "weak snapshot", i. e. downloading documents that have
> more or less the same timestamp. So we developed our application to download
> eagerly, and on that real world experience we provided the proposal.
OK, it sounds that this is somewhat specific to your use case. Personally, I don't see the advantage of sending links and then early getting each of the pieces: it creates multiple connections to get a single entity
> But I
> understand that other users might not have that need. BTW, about browsers: I
> don't know whether it's just my browser, but mine is loading ALL images at
> once when I open a HTML page. Yours is not? ;-)
Yes, but those are for embedded images like <img src="…"> not <a href="…">. In general, embedding binary data in HTML/XML isn't a good idea (hence <img> and MTOM); the use case for structural links is more general than that.
-- Santiago