Re: Editorial thoughts on qaframe-spec

At 08:10 AM 10/15/02 +0200, you wrote:
>Le mar 15/10/2002 à 01:31, Lofton Henderson a écrit :
> > At 06:51 PM 10/14/02 +0200, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
> > >First thing I'm trying to do is to harmonize and formalize our
> > >checkpoints,
> >
> > I'm thinking that I should make these changes simultaneously with 
> OpsGL/ET,
> > for the 1-nov publication.  What do you think?
>
>That would be great, if you have time to do so.

Especially if we slip publication to 6-nov, I should be able to do some of it.

>
> > Question.  Does most of the deleted stuff -- or at least lots of it -- get
> > migrated to Spec Extech?
>
>Not most, only part of it. I've just added a new CSS rule that highlight
>in light yellow the deleted text that will be moved to ET.

Excellent.

>The other
>reasons for deletions are:
>- grouping in a DOV section and/or in a separate DOV document
>- redundancy
>- decisions of the WG from issue resolutions
>
>If you find things that are not likely to fit in this splitting, let me
>know.
>
> > >I have not worked at all on the introductory section, since I think
> > >Lofton plans to do it. I'll try to propose a plan for this section ASAP.
> >
> > Okay.  My initial idea was mostly to cut, simplify, tighten, and
> > condense.  [...snip...]
> >
> > More about that later, on the IG list (is that the right place for it?).
>
>The discussion of technology vs spec belongs to the IG list, indeed.
>However, since I'm about to propose a new division of these GL, maybe it
>would be better that I get my project and ideas in a good shape before
>we start a new thread on the IG list?

I'll keep commenting on WG list for now.

>
> > But for now ... any thoughts on preliminary sketch of changes to Chapter 1?
>
>Looks good. I would keep the DOV concept as a separate section, though,
>since it might become somewhat largish.

I agree, separate subsection.  But I'm not sure it needs to be large.  The 
concept itself is simple enough.  It would only get large if we go into 
discussing details of particular DoV and their inter-relationships (which I 
would recommend to avoid in Chapter 1).

>Some ideas of what need to be clearly available:
>- scope and use cases of the document; this should refer to a product
>class (specifications).

I planned to add a "Scope" section.  In fact, planned to try to conform w/ 
GL1 and GL2, even though my "use cases" will only be placeholders.

"Specifications" is a new class of product.  Ironic that SpecGL itself 
defines a new CoP, because it doesn't fit into the taxonomy that it 
standardizes!  (However, I think that is okay -- not many people are 
writing standards for specifications.)

>- in the "understanding and using this document", indicate the existence
>of a set of test assertions per CP

Okay.

>- the CP priorities should link to the conformance section
>- RFC 2119 should appear as a normative reference; we should precise
>that we capitalize the keywords as suggested in the RFC

I planned to do these.

>- we have to distinguish what's normative and what's informative in the
>introductory section as well

Clarification.  Do you mean in Chapter 1 to distinguish what is normative 
in the rest of the document, or normative in Chapter 1 itself?

Hmmm... I had thought that there would not be normative content in Chapter 
1, and in fact tried to avoid such in previous 
versions.  Normative:  "prescriptive or containing conformance 
requirements".   But maybe there will be.  We can look at the draft and 
discuss what, if anything, qualifies as normative.

It would be nice and tidy if we could keep Ch.1 as an informative 
introduction to concepts, and have all of the requirements in Guidelines 
and Conformance chapters.  We'll see.

Btw, SMIL20 [1] is an interesting example of a specification that has tried 
hard separate normative/informative.  Have a look, for example, starting at 
section 2.  Each subsection is labelled.  Even those subsections which 
appear to define concepts (e.g., modularization and profiling) are labelled 
"Informative".

-Lofton.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2002 11:13:04 UTC