An inheritance-based specification of objects does not necessarily imply
any central authority or registry; I was just trying to satisfy requirement
#3 in the framework of inheritance. You could just as easily do a local
lookup of the type name or ask the original server for an expansion of the
type (as a scene graph with lots more nodes, perhaps).
Perhaps a keyword based scheme provides a bit more flexibility, but it
does not give you a logical relationship between types (inheritance
tree) that could clue you in to which substitutes are acceptable in what
situations.
I just took a look at the final draft of the spec and found the "isA"
field name. This is probably equivalent to what I have proposed, and
seems already established. Maybe it should be expanded with a list
of keywords describing the added functionality of the new node, which
would enable keyword-based searches throught the class library, wherever
that repository happens to be.
-pete
-- Pete McCann [email protected] Department of Computer Science http://swarm.wustl.edu/~mccap/ Washington University in St. Louis