ExperimentExperimental
Experiment: Portable Items
Letting one document export a single item — a card, a lesson, a record — as a standalone document, without understanding its application.
Data portability
Documents accumulate things: cards on a board, entries in a journal, questions in a quiz. Sometimes one of those things should leave — be sent to someone, or moved into another document — without the whole file going with it.
Portable Items is an opt-in extension, specified in IDOP Workspace Containers 1.0, that lets a reader do this without understanding the application. A document declares, in its manifest, where it keeps an index of its items and their data. The reader can then list the items and derive a new, standalone document containing exactly one item and the shared files it depends on.
What we wanted to learn
- Whether a small, declarative contract is enough for a generic reader to extract meaningful pieces of arbitrary applications.
- Whether derived documents can be made safe by construction: the reader copies only what the index points to, validates the result, and refuses anything else.
What we found so far
The contract is small — a declaration, an index, an item prefix — and the reference core implements listing and export. The hard part is not the mechanism but the incentive: an application has to maintain its index honestly. Readers therefore treat the index as a claim to verify, not a fact, and refuse items whose paths escape the declared prefix.
Status: implemented in the reference core and the command-line tool, and available in IDOP Cloud’s developer inspector (off by default). Not yet part of the everyday interface.