[Ndn-interest] any comments on naming convention? [version marker comment]

[Abdelzaher, Tarek]

Jeff,

> in the document I sent, there are seven specific, though not
> equally well considered, reasons to use marker components that have
> nothing to with the so-called type explosion.  As far as I can tell, no
> one has addressed these from the application developer's perspective.
> Could someone?

I have a small comment on the original name conventions document sent by 
Tai-Lin. I'd like to suggest a slight semantic generalization of the 
meaning of one of the proposed markers; namely, the versioning marker 
0xFD (which identifies the version of the component).

Do you see harm in overloading the semantics of the field identified by 
0xFD to refer to a general "priority" hint? As the document suggests, by 
convention, priority could be given to, say, lexicographically larger 
values in that field. The document says "[versioning] can be used by 
third-parties, e.g., to prioritize caching of the latest versions of 
data". I can see other reasons that applications or transport protocols 
might want to instruct caches to prioritize objects that have the same 
prefix. It would be convenient to be able to insert a value in the 0xFD 
field such that larger lexicographic values are prioritized (in caches, 
etc) over smaller ones. One such scenario is described in the 
"Information Funnel" paper, where the lexicographical priority "value" 
would be an entire name postfix (referring a subtree in which some 
lexicographically ordered branches are more important than others). 
Application software and/or transport layers could then properly name 
producer objects slated for sharing with subscribers such that the 
network is aware of their relative importance. Think, for example, of 
layered video encoding, where base-layer objects should be prioritized 
over enhancement-layer objects. Any thoughts/comments?

Tarek