Re: [access-control] syntax is still suboptimal?

Completely agreed.

The only distinction I'd make is that if you *ever* want the  
opportunity to extend (i.e., if the world is less than ideal), there  
better be some accommodation for it now, or things will break in nasty  
ways when it gets added and existing implementations trip across the  
extensions.

If there's a really high degree of certainty about the current payload  
of the header, the WG could make a conscious decision to freeze it,  
with the understanding that any changes / additions would have to be  
in separate (probably new) headers. IME, most people find this  
unpalatable, but YMMV.

The other approach would be to allow extensibility in the BNF, but  
place restrictions on the creation of extensions WRT backwards- 
compatibility (and perhaps even restricting who can mint extensions;  
e.g. to W3C REC-track docs).

Cheers,


On 29/01/2008, at 1:15 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>>
>> 1) You'll have to change it anyway if you want to support  
>> extensions. I
>> haven't seen a discussion of this yet.
>
> For what it's worth, I actually consider this a feature, not a bug.  
> Making
> extensions to this should be _hard_, to reduce the temptation for  
> people
> to actually extend it. Ideally, this would never be extended.
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                ) 
> \._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _ 
> \  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'-- 
> (,_..'`-.;.'

--
Mark Nottingham       mnot@yahoo-inc.com

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 03:06:55 UTC