[OSC_dev] Everyone Invited - SYNoscopy

[Andy W. Schmeder]

On Dec 17, 2008, at 1:42 AM, Jamie Bullock wrote:

> This is a really interesting . For me highlights the 'missing
> ingredient' from OSC, which is an equivalent to a DTD or schema for a
> given address space.

The DTD (or XMLSchema if you prefer) is for validation; its not a  
necessary component.

All that is needed is the equivalent of an XML namespace declaration,  
which is really just a URI, which myself and others have referred to  
as an "OSC Address Schema" in the past.


> IMO, it would be useful to have a set of standard methods that a  
> server
> *must* provide in order to be OSC protocol compliant. These would
> provide information about the server's supported addresses and message
> formats. Thus alleviating the need for ad hoc documentation because a
> server would in effect become self-documenting. This would make it a  
> lot
> easier for people to develop standards on top of OSC, equivalents of
> SOAP, XHTML etc as you say.


A standardized set of methods for discovery/enumeration of an address  
space is possible, but that should be specified through a namespace  
declaration, not part of the core protocol--again, too much overhead.

An additional consideration is that OSC does not require a  
bidirectional transport--so "standard methods" are simply not  
possible, but one could have standard attributes that are reported in  
the stream.  Also the stateless design goal means that stream  
interruption should be non-catastrophic; the way to deal with this is  
to have the meta-information re-reported once per second or so.


---

Andy W. Schmeder
andy [at] cnmat.berkeley.edu
Programmer/Analyst II
Research Group
Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
University of California at Berkeley
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu