Mike Beckerle wrote:
I don't draw a distinction between a sequence of N bytes and an N-byte represenational-size object of undetermined type. Or rather, the difference is just of the intent of the person using it.
I think that this discussion raises important issues of scope and extensibility. I think that it would be reasonable to have an annotation to capture the fact that a sequence of bytes is (usually) to be treated as a block. I think such an annotation would be description metadata. It should be possible to attach rich metadata to the tags to allow an application to get access to information about what it might do with such a block (or indeed any other type). There is an important question as to how much of this metadata we try to define. My take would be as little as possible. The metadata could get pretty involved, you need to know 1) its code 2) its java 3) it requires JVM 1.4+ 4) it needs Swing or whatever. Cheers, Martin