Commit 2677c902 authored by Eric Myhre's avatar Eric Myhre

doc: drop mention of hypothetical "IPFN".

It's no good to introduce a term just to spend a halfhearted paragraph
partially describing it just to say that it's out of scope.

The schema page also nowadays already has some mentions of how schema
are designed to avoid turing completeness and are not intended to
encompass dependent typing systems, so this descoping is already noted.
Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>
parent 7bfa6b34
......@@ -7,11 +7,10 @@ IPLD is a system for describing, storing, sharing, and hashing data.
Layers
------
IPLD comes in several layers:
IPLD comes in two distinct layers:
1. The IPLD Data Model
2. The IPLD Schema system
3. "IPFN"
The IPLD Data Model is a specification of the core serializable types of data.
You can think of it as roughly isomorphic to the familiar JSON and CBOR
......@@ -26,15 +25,18 @@ IPLD Schema bring common concepts like "structs" with named "fields", as well
as "enums" and even "unions" -- and make clear definitions of how to map all of
these concepts onto the basic serializable types of the Data Model.
You can use IPLD at any of these levels you choose. We recommend having a
You can use IPLD at either of these levels as you prefer. We recommend having a
schema for your data, because it makes validity checking, sanitization,
migration, and documentation all easier in the long run -- but the Data Model
is also absolutely usable stand-alone.
IPFN is mentioned here as an intent to design something between "dependent types"
and a full network and host agnostic computation platform. It is more of an
outline of a research direction than a particular project; the mention here is
mostly to make it clear what *not* to expect from this repo.
Some of the most exciting features of IPLD come from the crossover between
the two layers: for example, it's possible to create two distinct Schema specs,
and easily flip data between them since all the data on both sides consistently
fits in the Data Model; migration logic can be written as functions operating
purely on the Data Model layer to handle even complex structural changes.
The ability to freely mix and match strong validation with generic data handling
makes programs possible which would otherwise be cumbersome with either alone.
Nodes, operations, encoding, & linking
......
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