Nomad:

As I see it, most of your questions center around two points: metadata and design decisions. When you design an application, you'll have to decide what state information you want to keep about each object. You'll also have some information *about* the state information (the metadata). In some applications, you'll keep track of the metadata and in others, you won't. These are the choices you'll make as a designer.

Many of the specific questions you're asking are for clarifications of definitions--however the definitions are application-dependent as well. For one application, "modified" may mean a change to the values of a node, while for another application "modified" may mean a change to the data and/or metadata.

You should be able to resolve many of those questions by clarifying/negotiating the requirements with your users. For example, it may mean that you'll have several "modified" values, one for permissions changes, one for value changes, one for ....etc.

...roboticus

In reply to Re: So, what's an object attribute anyway? by roboticus
in thread So, what's an object attribute anyway? by Nomad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.