Re: QA Framework comment [was: Minutes for XML Core WG telcon of 2005 May 11]

[ I was tempted initially to simply Cc' the QA WG, but refrained myself and
  just Cc'ed dom and karl who may have an useful suggestion on how to resolve
  this, as we are all puzzled at this point. ]

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 12:49:39PM -0400, Paul Grosso wrote:
> 
> I hope others chime in, because I don't know how to answer.
> 
> At [1], I read:
> 
>   Clearly identify the class of products (i.e., type of
>   products or services) upon which the requirements are imposed.
> 
> and I ask myself whether I'd be able to do that for, say,
> the xml:id spec in such a way that would allow xml:id to
> go to PR, and I can't.  I either don't understand what's
> wanted and/or I can't figure out how to identify upon what
> products xml:id is imposing what requirements.

The document we are supposed to comply with is just a Working Draft.

  [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#what-conform

Since when the dependancy on a Working Draft can be imposed to a
specification finishing CR and going into PR at the last moment ? 
Process wise this is not understandable.

Now that Working Draft requires the spec to be able to "clearly
identify class of products" but IMHO fails to give a clear definition
for this or even garantee that this exists. 
  "The generic name" assume there is such a name. Well in the case of
xml:id I could immediately think of at least half a dozens of potential names 
   - XML parsers
   - XML libraries
   - XML toolkits
   - XML consumers
   - XML frameworks
   - XML applications
which would all make sense. So there is certainly no single generic name,
the "The" sounds to me a very excessive requirement.
Section 2.2.2 just suggests:
  Examples of classes of products include: content, producer of content,
     player, protocol, API, agent, and guidelines.

This seems to have a very narrow view that either the target are
format/data or full applications or documents, the target in our case are 
a subset of a huge class of applications.

If you start to look at it from an application perspective, just taking the
case of a browser, say Firefox, you probably have a default XML toolkit
to parse XML web resources which is a target, another XML implementation
in javascript for the scripting of the UI (XUL) which probably doesn't need
xml:id and at runtime a third XML parser from a Java application instanciated
from a web application which may or may not need xml:id.
Just stating that we expect browsers to implement xml:id just makes no sense
from my point of view as an example.

> So I'm sitting here thinking that I'd never be able to get
> xml:id to go to PR if the QA Framework requirement is
> imposed upon us.
> 
> If others think they understand what we'd have to do to
> xml:id (just to take one example) to satisfy the QA Framework
> requirement being imposed, then I guess it's just me, and
> we can forget making any WG response.
> 
> Henry, if you think you know how to make our specs comply
> with whatever this QA requirement is, given that you are
> the WG staff contact, then we can just have you add the
> necessary parts to any of our specs to have them comply.
> Just so long as I don't have to do it, because I couldn't.
> 
> paul

Dom, Karl, I can't map your requirements to anything which makes sense from
our point of view. Maybe you can quickly explain or suggest what this is about
because at this point the requirement from your draft just can't be mapped
to our situation, or we just don't understand it.

  thanks

Daniel


> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Henry S. Thompson [mailto:ht@inf.ed.ac.uk] 
> > Sent: Thursday, 12 May, 2005 6:45
> > To: Paul Grosso
> > Cc: public-xml-core-wg
> > Subject: Re: Minutes for XML Core WG telcon of 2005 May 11
> > 
> > Paul Grosso writes:
> > 
> > >> We've received a response from the QA group on our
> > >> comment about QA Framework.  See Paul's message
> > >> summarizing this at
> > >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-core-wg/2005May/0004
> > >
> > > Paul doesn't feel their response addresses our concerns,
> > > and he feels that we should push back on this.
> > >
> > > DV, Richard, and Henry tend to agree with Paul (though
> > > they may not feel as strongly about how much of a fuss
> > > to make).
> > >
> > > ACTION to Henry:  Draft a response to
> > > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2005May/0041
> > > making it clear this is an XML Core WG issue/comment,
> > > making it clear we aren't satisfied with the response,
> > > and trying to make it clearer what we're trying to say.
> > 
> > After looking more closely at the new draft [1] and our original
> > comment [2] I guess I don't now see what to say.  I think it's clear
> > that just being a member of a named product class doesn't make you
> > non-conforming, that always only happens if you _claim_ conformance.
> > 
> > Is what we want something that makes clear that a particular product
> > may be a member of different classes wrt different specs?  So e.g. a
> > UA may be a parser wrt XML but an API wrt DOM?
> > 
> > Or something that makes it clear that if a product in a covered class
> > is included or exploited in/by another product, then for the purposes
> > of conformance to the spec in question, the other product is _also_
> > covered?
> > 
> > ht
> > 
> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#what-conform
> > [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2005Jan/0025
> > -- 
> >  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, 
> > University of Edinburgh
> >                      Half-time member of W3C Team
> >     2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 
> > 131 650-4440
> >             Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
> >                    URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
> > [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without 
> > it is forged spam]
> > 
> 

-- 
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Received on Thursday, 12 May 2005 20:51:09 UTC