Re: Fwd: A sort of synthesis

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 7:43 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-03-08 at 19:01 -0800, Randall Leeds wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
>> <dennis.hamilton@acm.org> wrote:
>> > I think the injection of externally-held change-tracking is an interesting situation.
>> >
>> > Processors that attempt to merge the information in some way will have to be resilient with respect to situations where the subject XML document is not consistent with the one the changes were introduced for.
>> >
>> > It seems to me that the key issue is how the external material specifies where the tracked changes apply in the subject XML document.  Perhaps the closest highly-rigorous case is external application of XML Digital signatures to (parts of) an XML document.
>>
>> I would recommend against attempting to answer this question since
> [...]
>> "it's a pretty hard problem".
> Having previously shipped a product that could do external annotations
> pretty darned well even in the face of changes to the markup (in an SGML
> world, not HTML), and knowing the same methods would work fine for XML,
> I'd say it's an adequately solvable problem.
>
> If we don't try to do anything because it might be too hard to do
> perfectly or because someone else is trying to do something vaguely
> similar somewhere else there wouldn't be a Web today.

Sure. I'm wishing to promote collaboration, though. My recommendation
is just to avoid complex specifications for merging. If "resilient"
means recommending that processors not choke on bad input, then I
agree with Dennis. I believe representing the changes themselves,
though, is more central to the value proposition of this group.
Therefore, the specifics of subject referencing should be kept as
simple as possible.

 I was prematurely alarmist. I'm optimistic about our ability to
produce sane and succinct recommendations for external storage of
changes.

Received on Saturday, 9 March 2013 04:31:50 UTC