Re: ERB: decision and conundrum

Tim Bray wrote:
| 1. Contrary to our decision of last time, we will support subelement
|    addressing by a simple search operator.  We will make it clear that
|    bit-for-bit matching without respect to words or tokens is compliant
|    behavior; if implementations wish to compete on the basis of 
|    case-folding or other fancy search optimization, that's fine.

How can implementors implement case folding interoperably if there
is no specification saying how it shall be done?

| On another subject, we agonized further over the fact that current
| implementations of '#' in URLs always fetch the whole document and
| then navigate to the fragment in the client.  For SGML, this is
| probably often unreasonable.  Too bad - this behavior is not 
| carved in stone; early implementations that stupidly try to fetch
| the entire OED or Physician's Desk Reference, just to pull out a 
| fragment, will not succeed in the marketplace

If you specify server behavior for URLs that is not that specified
by the existing RFCs, please either call them something other than
URLs or put your case for variant behavior to the IETF's URL WG.  
"Too bad" is not much of an argument.  Did the ERB consider using queries
rather than fragment locators?



Regards,
  Terry Allen    Electronic Publishing Consultant    tallen[at]sonic.net
       specializing in Web publishing, SGML, and the DocBook DTD 
                   http://www.sonic.net/~tallen/
  A Davenport Group Sponsor:  http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html

Received on Monday, 17 March 1997 10:49:56 UTC