Dropping pragmas

Hi folks,

After Tuesday’s meeting and upon further reflection, I don’t think we’re
going to reach consensus on pragmas for Invisible XML v1. I don’t think
the remaining difficulties are technical, I think they’re philosophical
and ideological. I’m not saying we can’t work them out, but if we want
to have Invisible XML v1 finished for Prague, I’m suggesting that we
don’t have time to do it now.

I propose that we set pragmas aside as something we might come back to
in the future and move on with other things. The Balisage paper that
might previously have said words to the effect of “this design is
speculative, the CG hasn’t accepted pragmas yet” can simply say
something along the lines of “this design describes an add-on for
Invisible XML and is not part of the 1.0 specification.” I don’t think
that diminishes from the value of the paper or the technical discussion
it contains.

Rather than dwelling on this failure to reach consensus, maybe we can
see if it opens up enough room in the schedule to quickly take up and
resolve the proposal for “insertions” that Steven suggested a couple of
weeks ago. I think it’s a great feature and the design looked pretty
solid to me. I only objected at the time on the grounds that we already
had pragmas on the agenda and I assumed that would take a few weeks to
sort them out. Users can manage without pragmas in v1, I think, but
they’ll really thank us for the insertions feature. 

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica