Re: Comments on XPP draft o2 24 January 2013

On Oct 16, 2013, at 10:28 AM, Henry S. Thompson wrote:

> At its recent f2f, the XProc WG renewed its efforts to address the
> concerns you raised in August with respect to our January draft [1]
> 
> This is the first of what I hope will be a steady flow of responses.
> 
> To start with a short and, I hope, easy one, you write:
> 
>  4.4 Definitions
> 
>  The spec appears still to lack definitions for key terms, including
>  most prominently profile and processing (specifically processing of
>  declarations).
> 
>  This means that the issues originally raised as issue 4 and issue 7
>  in the review of April 2011 remain unresolved. If the WG's belief is
>  that the reference to the XML spec suffices as a gloss of the words
>  "reading and processing all external markup declarations", then I
>  regret to inform you that this reader does not find any useful
>  distinction between reading and processing in that document. What in
>  the world do you think these words mean?
> 
> The phrase you mention, "reading and processing all external markup
> declarations", is based on the second paragraph of the Entity Declared
> Well-formedness constraint [2] in the XML spec.

Yes, this is true.

It does not, however, answer the question I had when I read the
XPP spec and asked in the paragraph quoted above.  The WG's 
answer appears to amount to "we don't know what they mean, and
it doesn't matter because the XML spec used them before us without
explaining what they mean."

You have a report from one reader (who has also read the XML
spec) who found the unexplained usage confusing.  You can
define the terms, if you actually intend anything specific by them,
you can quote them (literally, for figuratively, by making clearer
than is done in the current draft that by "reading and processing" 
you mean "whatever the XML spec means by these terms",
perhaps with a little picture of Caesar washing his hands of 
responsibility), or you can leave things alone and let readers make
of the text whatever they can.  The first of these approaches 
continues to seem best to me, but if you have a large number
of reports from readers who immediately understood that your
wording echoed that of the XML spec, then perhaps you might
prefer the third approach.

-- 
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* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
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Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2013 20:45:24 UTC