Re: minimal requirements for Arch document

> Michael Kifer wrote:
> > 
> > [...]  We should strive to define extensions that are orthogonal
> > as much as possible, and when they are not we should indicate that.
> > 
> > A while ago I sent around a picture that contained the various extensions.
> 
> Such a picture will probably be helpful in helping understand how 
> various future extensions/dialects relate.
> 
> But it should not be interpreted as an a priori roadmap for the 
> development of RIF dialects/extensions, right? Not too strictly, at 
> least: once we will have defined the core(s), the development of new 
> dialects and/or extensions should be driven by users requirements much 
> more than theory, in my opinion (that's not incompatible with the 
> picture: only with the idea that such an a priori picture defines 
> somehow the list of extensions/dialects that will be developed).

I simply put in most of the well-known extensions and organized them as
well as I could.


> > We should advise/encourage to make the presentation syntaxes compatible as
> > well, but it should not be a requirement, I agree. This is because the
> > usual presentation syntaxes do not have as many tricks in their hat as XML
> > does.
> 
> The presentation syntax depends on the culture and habits of the user 
> community for each dialect, and this can differ quite a lot from a 
> dialect to another. I think that the advice should be to make the 
> presentation syntax as familiar to the intended audience as possible 
> (and the XML syntax as standard as possible).

The presentation syntax is for specifying the semantics and for the examples.
It is true that it would be good to make this acceptable to the respective
communities, but we also should strive to keep consistency within RIF itself.
RIF presentation syntax is not a concrete syntax, so the consideration of
being familiar to the community seems less important than the internal RIF
consistency.


	--michael

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 16:24:46 UTC