handles for technical specs

Dear TSD TF participants,

One of the issues that were discovered during the implemenation of 
the new test samples database is that it would be desriable to have a 
"handle" for technical specs referenced by the 'technicalSpec' 
element <http://bentoweb.org/refs/TCDL2.0.html#edef-technicalspec>.

The reasons are
(1) that not every spec has an official URL (although it would be 
possible to use e.g. Wikipedia URLs if there is no URL from a 
standards body or a vendor for a spec) and
(2) that the 'specName' element is an element type with mixed content 
that is prone to accidental changes (insertion of line breaks during 
XSLT processing or "indent XML" actions, conversion of entity 
references to actual Unicode characters) that make string comparison 
in the database less reliable than expected.

We could address this by adding e.g. an attribute called 'handle' to 
the 'technicalSpec' element. We should then also agree on the values 
to be used in this new construct (consistency can be enforced by 
means of Schematron). For example, we could use values such as the following:
* w3c_xhtml10 (XHTML 1.0),
* w3c_css20 (CSS 2.0),
* w3c_css21 (CSS 2.0),
* ecma_262 (JavaScript),
* ms_wmv (Microsoft Windows Media Video),
* ms_asf (Microsoft ASF),
* ...

Of course we could also choose more "human friendly" values. Any thoughts?

Best regards,

Christophe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
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Received on Monday, 20 April 2009 10:49:22 UTC