- From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 May 2022 10:52:23 -0600
- To: John Lumley <john@saxonica.com>
- Cc: public-ixml@w3.org
John Lumley writes: > Are we going to mandate that the version is a number/ or a > multiply-dotted digit sequence ? That would simplify some kinds of later uses. But it seems to assume that version identifiers will naturally fall, or can be induced to fall, into a sequence. If we imagine the community group preparing for a choice between doing things one way or another way -- call them the blue and green approaches -- by producing variant grammars for comparison, so people can work with them and it's clear from the labeling which approach a particular sample grammar assumes, then I think it might be simpler if they had names like '1.1 blue' and '1.1 green'. Forcing them both to be numeric imposes a notion of sequence on them that is at best confusing. (The history of HTML version numbers has, if I remember correctly, at least one example of such a confusion and possibly more.) I think it would probably be a good idea to decide that we as a group will use only decimal numbers in published specs while allowing drafts in progress to have other names, as above. But I am not sure anyone ever gets this kind of forward-looking infrastructure completely right, and I am willing to be taught a better approach. For the moment, my view is: no one gets it completely right, but getting it even partly right is worth a lot, and having version labels is a good step. Michael -- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Black Mesa Technologies LLC http://blackmesatech.com
Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2022 16:52:40 UTC