Re: comment on 1 August 2008 draft of Content Transformation Guidelines 1.0

Thanks for the comment, Michael.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> 
> Would it perhaps be better to give this specification a more informative
> title, or at least some sort of informative subtitle?
> 
> The phrase "Content Transformation" sounds to an uninitiated reader
> as if it could apply to anything from the use of the data manipulation
> language (e.g. SQL) in a database management system, to the use of
> XSLT, or the SAX or DOM interfaces, to transform XML documents, to
> the use of dynamic HTML techniques to transform data in the browser.
> 
> Perhaps "Mobile Web Content Transformation"?  Or "Content Transformation
> for Mobile Presentation"?  Surely there are ways of making it easier
> for potential readers to see whether the document is relevant to their
> concerns or not.

FWIW, Dom raised a similar issue on the non-mobile scope implied by the 
title shortly before the document was published as First Public Working 
Draft. The addition of "Mobile" in the title was discarded by the WG on 
the grounds that, although the Mobile context triggered the creation of 
the document, there is nothing especially mobile in the spec.

That being said, I fully agree that, on top of that, "Content 
Transformation" sounds like it could be talking about e.g XSLT. There is 
probably a way to highlight in the title that we're talking about 
transformation by proxies of HTTP requests and responses that go through 
them.

Francois.


> 
> This isn't the first W3C spec to have such a generic title; the experience
> of the XML Schema specification, however, leads me to commend to you
> urgently the wisdom of have a more specific, more informative, less
> generic title for your document.
> 
> --Michael Sperberg-McQueen
>   W3C XML Activity
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 07:00:28 UTC