Re-reading Roy T. Fielding's famous disseration of Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. It is really long, hard-to-understand, but valuable.

I do not want to write a whole review today, but something about one single paragraph:

A distributed hypermedia architect has only three fundamental options: 1) render the data where it is located and send a fixed-format image to the recipient; 2) encapsulate the data with a rendering engine and send both to the recipient; or, 3) send the raw data to the recipient along with metadata that describes the data type, so that the recipient can choose their own rendering engine.

It is very instructive. Looking back to the history of the Internet, people are always moving among these opitons. But I think there should be unlimited options, which form a triangle. Roy's options are the 3 vertices of the triangle. We may call it Distributed Data Style Triangle or whatever you like and cool.

Telnet: Option 3.1

HTML, WML, XHTML: Option 3

Java Applet: Option 2

Java Script, ECMA Script, VB Script: Option 3

AJAX: Option 2

Flash: Option 2

XML: Opiton 3

XML + XSLT: between Option 2 and Option 3

Online Game: between Option 2 and Option 3

Yahoo Finance Indices Chart: Option 1

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