The pending codec -> conversion split changes the signature of
Encode and Decode to be more complicated. Create a stub helper
with the exact semantics of today and do the simple mechanical
refactor here to reduce the cost of that change.
Make clients opt in to decoding objects that are stored
in the generic api.List object by invoking runtime.DecodeList()
with a set of schemes. Makes it easier to handle unknown
schema objects because decoding is in the control of the code.
Add runtime.Unstructured, which is a simple in memory
representation of an external object.
