[Bug 2249] R-257: Health warning needed about percent-escaping URIs

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2249





------- Comment #8 from mike@saxonica.com  2007-09-24 18:18 -------
In response to comment #5: "it helps ensure that the question "is this string
in the lexical space of this datatype?" can be answered in finite time.".

I don't think this is true. If I imagine an infinite document supplied as input
to a streaming validator, then I cannot in finite time decide whether the
document is valid or not, and this is true whether or not I constrain the
strings within the document to be finite. Saying they must be finite therefore
adds nothing.

Looking at it another way, in your paper at Extreme Markup 2005

http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme/proceedings/html/2005/SperbergMcQueen02/EML2005SperbergMcQueen02.html

you wrote "I pride myself on my spec draftsmanship, but [...] is not a
definition I would want to make; it's not something that would turn into what
the QA people would consider a testable assertion."

Quite right: it's a good idea not to say something in a spec unless it's a
testable assertion. And in my view, saying that a string must be finite falls
firmly into the non-testable category.

Received on Monday, 24 September 2007 18:19:05 UTC