E.1 The Basic Points of View

PAPER: The important objects are complete digital documents, analogous to pieces of paper, viewed in isolation by people. See Figure E-1.

Figure E-1. Example paper point of view object

A major concern is to be able to present such objects as directly as possible to a court or other third party. Because what is presented to the person is all that is important, anything that can affect it, such as a stylesheet, must be considered an intrinsic part of the paper. Sometimes proponents of the paper orientation forget that the "paper" originates in a computer; may travel over, be processed in, and stored in computer systems; and is viewed on a computer. such operations may involve transcoding, enveloping, composition of messages from pieces of other messages, or data reconstruction.

PROTOCOL: What is important are bits on the wire generated and consumed by computer protocol processes. These bits are marshaled into composite messages that can have rich, multilevel structure. See Figure E-2. No person ever sees the full message as such; rather, it is viewed as a whole only by a "geek" when debugging even then he or she sees some translated visible form. If you ever have to demonstrate something about such a message in a court or to a third party, there isn't any way to avoid having experts interpret it. Sometimes proponents of the protocol orientation forget that pieces of such messages are actually included in or influence data displayed to a person.

Figure E-2. Example protocol point of view object