[cap-talk] Techtalk by Doug Crockford on "Gears and the Mashup Problem"

[John Carlson]

On Oct 1, 2007, at 1:42 PM, Jed Donnelley wrote:

> On 9/28/2007 9:10 AM, Bill Tulloh wrote:
>> On 9/19/07, Mark Miller <erights at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Doug Crockford will be giving a Google Techtalk  tomorrow, 9/20 at
>>> 11am on "Gears and the Mashup Problem"
>>
>> The video of the talk is now online at:
>> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=452089494323007214
>>
>> Bill
>
> Thanks for the announcement Bill.  It was nice to be able
> to hear the presentation that I was unable to attend.
>
It was also nice for me.

My understanding is that the idea is to create vats that have their
own document object model.   The danger I see in this, is that
I think many elements in the DOM have a pointer to their parent,
so if you send a child element, you can still get to anything in
the other vat.  Thus only JSON text and numbers and structures
of those will be sent.  JSON will become
the new DOM.  You can't send elements without putting huge
holes in your security.  You could pass a capability by taking
the unguessable name of an element and passing it to the
the other vat.   That's your choice.

My question is, how do vats get introduced to each other.
Obviously, a vat will know its children,
so the module manager will know all of its children.  Thus a vat
must communicate with the module manager to figure
out how to talk to other vats.  What kind of communication
takes place here?  It seems like it may be more than JSON,
but see above.

John