- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:23:48 +0000
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: "Michael Schneider" <schneid@fzi.de>, "Ulrike Sattler" <sattler@cs.man.ac.uk>, "OWL Working Group WG" <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
On 22 Feb 2008, at 10:50, Bijan Parsia wrote: [snip] > "Typical non-standard" seems like a "spec smell" to me. If it's > typical, let's standardize it. In fact, this is more than typical: > It's ubiquitous. [snip] I realized after sending this that people might not understand what I mean by "spec smell". I mean it by analogy to "code smell": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell which is, in my understanding, a fairly neutral term (i.e., code smells don't necessarily mean there's a problem, just that careful examination and justification is required). I think if we find ourselves saying, in informative text, that some deviance is "typical but nonstandard" we ought to scrutinize very carefully why this *typical* behavior is nonstandard. All things considered, it may make sense to keep it as "typical but nonstandard", but I think the more we can avoid such the better off the spec. (Esp. if implementors end up using the informative part to guide the user observable behavior of their software.) Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Friday, 22 February 2008 12:21:51 UTC