Re: rq25 review

Kendall Clark <kendall@clarkparsia.com> wrote on 02/25/2007 08:05:40 PM:

> 3 RDF Term Constraints
> 
> Second, is this the 'may' of specification or 
> colloquial speech? Why doesn't rq25 use
> terms like "may", "must", "must not", etc in their standard 
> specification sense?
> 
> At the very least, if it's not going to use them in that way, it 
> should *say* that it's not going to
> use them in that way so that readers don't interpret them in that way 
> by mistake.
> 
> But, really, shouldn't there be some really solid, domain-specific 
> reason why we aren't *specifying*
> using "may", "must", etc?
> 
> I'm all for flouting convention and throwing over best practices, but 
> surely you need *good* reasons
> to do so? What are our good reasons?

I believe that this practice in the query language specification dates 
back to recommendations from DanC. The reasoning is summarized here:
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005OctDec/0102.html

I don't believe that we need to specifically call out that we are not 
invoking RFC 2119; there are plenty of other RFCs which we are also not 
using.

Thanks for the detailed review, Kendall. I believe that most of the other 
comments are editorial, so I will leave them to Andy and Eric. That said, 
I figured that now might be a good time to reiterate some review 
suggestions that Dan contributed before our first last call:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005AprJun/0342

The main ones which I would like to encourage are:

"""
Every comment should come with suggested replacement text.
If you just can't think of replacement wording, but
you're 100% certain something is broken, sketch a test
case. The editors are not obliged to do anything about
comments that don't include suggested replacement text nor a
test case (sketch).
"""

and

"""
Try to distinguish between

 -- suggestions, which the editor is free
  to take or leave without explanation

 -- requests, which the editor should act on
  or explain why not

 -- critical issues, which should go on the
  WG agenda if the editor doesn't agree
"""

...but there's plenty of other experienced wisdom in that message that 
should help us get from where we are now to Last Call.

Lee

Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 15:01:28 UTC