Re: XML Conformance Levels [Was: ERB Decisions of March 26th]

What Jon said.  Remember, conformance levels didn't work for HTML
because vendors implemented what they had ready as soon as they
could rather than wait to meet all the requirements of a given
conformance level.  

Re PUBLIC, fine by me.  The discussion has shown me that SYSTEM and
PUBLIC are the wrong concepts for the Internet; as SYSTEM now means
URL, it's okay, but unless PUBLIC means URN, I'd rather not have it;
it's not clear to me that the SGML ERB would settle for PUBLIC=URN
rather than PUBLIC=public-per-8879.

Regards, Terry

From w3c-sgml-wg-request@w3.org Wed Mar 26 16:36:03 1997
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From: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM (Jon Bosak)
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Subject: Re: XML Conformance Levels [Was: ERB Decisions of March 26th]
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[Murray Altheim:]

| BTW, on talking with Bill Smith about the variance in needs between people
| like Tim and Eliot's needs, what's the likelihood of defining conformance
| levels for XML? This would allow a lightwight app to have, for example:
| 
|    XML-CORE:  Level 1 (core of XML)
|    XML-LINK:  Level 1 (basic linking ala HTML)
|    XML-STYLE: Level 0 (no stylesheets)
[etc.]

One of the most basic design principles for this whole effort has
been: Thou Shalt Have No Optional Features.  We're implicitly allowing
for very large-scale optionality by dividing the spec into three parts
(xml-lang, xml-link, and xml-style), because it's obvious that there
will be database exchange applications that only need xml-lang, for
example, and Java-based approaches like CML that will use xml-lang and
xml-link but not xml-style.  I would powerfully resist any effort to
get more granular than that.  The lack of options in XML is one of the
very best things about it.

Jon

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 1997 19:55:05 UTC