SAMP RFC changes

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Juan de Dios Santander Vela wrote:

> El 20/01/2009, a las 14:48, Mark Taylor escribió:
>
>> Hi Juan,
>> 
>> yes, like you say, this kind of extensibility is explicitly encouraged
>> in MType parameter sets and at other places within SAMP.
>> Section 5.2 says:
>>
>>  "The parameters and return values associated with each MType form
>>   extensible vocabularies as explained in Section 2.6, except that
>>   there is no reserved "samp." namespace."
>> 
>> and Section 2.6 contains the text:
>>
>>  "The general rule is that hubs and clients which encounter keys
>>   which they do not understand should ignore them, propagating them to
>>   downstream consumers if appropriate. As far as possible, where new keys
>>   are introduced they should be such that applications which ignore them
>>   will continue to behave in a sensible way."
>> 
>> which I think answers your query - do you agree?
>
> Completely!
>
>> I admit that this clarification is easy to miss (it took me a few minutes
>> grepping the LaTeX to find it, and I knew it was there...).  I think that
>> may be unavoidable given the length of the document and what it's trying
>> to cover, but if you've got a suggestion for how it could be made more
>> obvious, fire away.
>
>
> In fact, I wrote this message because I was going to write in an article 
> something like: "optional parameters MAY be discarded by applications not 
> implementing them, as stated in the SAMP Proposed Recommendation", but I was 
> not able to find exactly that information.
>
> Perhaps a good place to remember this thing is the page with the wiki the 
> Application Domain MTypes?

I've put a short note to this effect on the SampMTypes page.  You
can rephrase it if you think it needs clarification.

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/