Re: Feedback from FOMS

On 28 jan 2010, at 13:48, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:

> What I would like is more clear requirements and less "specification by example" (examples are useful, but should be marked as such). Right now, 5.2.1 and 3.2 to which it refers is most in need of this, since they *only* contain examples and no requirements as far as I can see. If we want to require HTTP byte range requests to be used (rather than being protocol agnostic, which I would prefer) then a reference to the spec for HTTP byte ranges would be in order, for example.


The intention is definitely that the user-visible layers are protocol agnostic, and I think section 3.2 is okay in this respect (the "byte range" reference is in an example). Whether section 3 would need requirements: I'm not sure. The main point of the section is to explain the difference between using fragments and queries, and which ones you need for a certain application depends on the requirements of the application. So there's really no requirements from the MF point of view. The requirements for implementing the functionality is in section 4.

I do agree with your previous comment that section 4 is now a bit of a mixed bag, having both implementation requirements and the syntax for the external representation, and that this should be fixed. I would hope that such a fix would address your comment here as well. 5.2.1 could then get a reference to the section-previously-known-as-4 that has the implementation requirements (and possibly 3.2 could have a similar reference, stating that "section 3.2 is applicable if the client application implements the functionality of section XXX all by itself". It might as well also state that this is probably going to be the case if you want to support MF on local file access.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

Received on Thursday, 28 January 2010 16:02:40 UTC