Re: ISSUE 79 editorial changes

On 23.03.2010 21:48, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, tightening up wording is fine, so long as it
> maintains the intent of the original proposal. I would guess most
> reviewers of the Change Proposal were considering primarily the concept
> of the change, not the exact word choices. Otherwise they would probably
> have noted the fact that the original was ungrammatical and did not
> state any conformance requirements for either documents or
> implementations. That being said, I'm waiting for Julian to check

This just illustrates that we're disagreeing a lot on spec writing style.

Defining syntax and semantics of this doesn't require any "conformance 
requirements". Just state what the damn value is: a set of 
comma-separated keywords.

There's really no point in insulting the reader with something as 
complex as:

"To obtain the list of keywords that the author has specified as 
applicable to the page, the user agent must run the following steps:

    1.

       Let keywords be an empty list.
    2.

       For each meta element with a name attribute and a content 
attribute and whose name attribute's value is keywords, run the 
following substeps:
          1.

             Split the value of the element's content attribute on commas.
          2.

             Add the resulting tokens, if any, to keywords.
    3.

       Remove any duplicates from keywords.
    4.

       Return keywords. This is the list of keywords that the author has 
specified as applicable to the page."

...which in the end says exactly the same, except that it makes a 
superfluous statements about repeating keywords and repeating instances 
of the <meta> element.

> whether the revisions (committed as a separate change) maintain his
> intent before closing the issue.

I'm not totally happy with the wording, but I have similar concerns with 
the whole spec.

Let's close this issue,

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 21:10:49 UTC