Remarks on W3C Editor's Draft 24 January 2008 ( part II)

Dear,


The Abstract says
[[

An XML Pipeline specifies a sequence of operations to be performed on **one
or more** XML documents. Pipelines generally accept **one or more** XML
documents as input and produce **one or more** XML documents as output.
Pipelines are made up of simple steps which perform atomic operations on XML
documents and constructs similar to conditionals, **loops** and exception
handlers which control which steps are executed.
]]
emphasis is mine

But later in 1 Introduction we find

[[
An XML Pipeline specifies a sequence of operations to be performed on a
collection of XML input documents. Pipelines take **zero or more** XML
documents as their input and produce **zero or more** XML documents as their
output.
]]

Please do hamonize them

Furthermore, I dislike the word "loops" in the abstract. Later in the spec
it is referenced as "iterations" which is more appropriate.

---

[[
The inputs to a step come from the web, from the pipeline document, from the
inputs to the pipeline itself, or from the outputs of other steps in the
pipeline. The outputs from a step are consumed by other steps, are outputs
of the pipeline as a whole, or are discarded.
]]
isn't it more "inputs of" instead of "inputs to" ?

--

To be consistent with the Figure 1, please replace "Validate" by "Validate
with XML Schema" in the text after the figure.

--

In 2.1 Steps

[[
[Definition: A step is the basic computational unit of a pipeline.] A
typical step has some number of inputs, from which it receives XML documents
to process, some number of outputs, to which it sends XML document results,
and may have options and/or parameters.
]]

Please replace "some number of" by a more precise "zero or more"
isn't the "may" in "may have" an RFC one ?

--

s/a Validate with XML Schema step validates/a Validate-with-xml-schema step
validates/

--

For "implementations may provide others as well", RFC may
(After reading a bit more of the spec, I think a lot more may and must
should RFC'ied, but I fear I have no idea of what the rule of thumbs are...)

--

After
[[
 It is not an error to connect a port that is declared to produce a sequence
of documents to a port that is declared to accept only a single document. It
is, however, an error if the former step actually produces more than one
document at run time.
 ]]
Please add that the reverse is also not an error, say
[[
 It is not an error to connect a port that is declared to produce a single
document to a port that is declared to accept only a sequence of documents.
The sequence of one document and a single document are considered the same.
]]

--

[[
A step matches its signature if and only if it specifies an input for each
declared input,
]]
I don't think this is true, since we can omit non primary inputs

--

s/URIs.Whether/URIs. Whether/

To be continued...

Mohamed

-- 
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