[Bug 3220] Terminology: "must"

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=3220





------- Comment #5 from cmsmcq@w3.org  2008-02-12 22:53 -------
At last month's face to face meeting, the working group agreed on a
direction for resolving bug 5293 which involves a slight change to
the categorization of errors and to the story outlined here in comment #1.
In connection with that decision, it's clear that the wording does need
to be revisited both in part 1 and in part 2.  So I fear that I must
answer the implicit question in comment #4 by saying "Of course this
change should affect both part 1 and part 2; the alternative is to have
the two specs using fundamental terms like 'must' and 'error' in
pointlessly different ways."

The formulations criticized in the bug description are not quite the
same in Structures and in Datatypes; Structures appears not to contain
any definition of 'error'; the principle that in the presence of errors
all bets are off is enunciated not in a definition of the term 'error'
but in section 5.1.

For what it's worth, I do not understand the remarks about section
2.4 in comment #2.  The proposal appears to be either (a) that there
is no need to talk about the relation of the concept "error" and the
concept "conforming schema document" at all, or (b) that wherever that
relation is clarified, it ought not to be clarified in section 2.4 of
Structures.  Proposition (b) may be true, or may not; either way, it 
seems premature to worry about where the clarification should be made.
Proposition (a) amounts to saying that we should continue to use the
terms "conformance" and "error" without clarifying how they relate to
each other; this seems to me too harebrained an idea to merit discussion.

On the question of allowing processors to correct errors silently
(as long, presumably, as their documentation does not contain any claim
that silent processing amounts to an assurance that the schema documents
processed were OK), the idea seems to run directly counter to the sense 
of the working group when the issue was discussed in Redmond.  It also 
seems to run directly counter to the idea of interoperability among
schema processors.  But there seem to be rather different ideas in the
WG about what the word "interoperability" means.

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 22:54:03 UTC