Re: one thing we forgot

You cannot determine a dialect just by its syntax. Examples are: LP with stable
model semantics and with well-founded semantics.
Closer to home: BLD and a (syntactically) BLD-like document with F-logic
semantics. The former does not have inheritance, while the latter does.

Designing dialects that can be disambiguated syntactically is going to be tough and we don't understand this enough. I think Harold's proposal for an optional attribute is a good compromise.

	--michael  


On Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:53:05 -0400
Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> > There is nothing in the current XML or presentation syntax that
> > identifies a document as belonging to a particular dialect, like BLD or PRD.
> > Without this it is not clear how an external application will know what to
> > do with a set of rules found somewhere out there. I think this calls for a
> > mandatory attribute for the document tag. Can also be done with a mandatory
> > meta annotation, but I think this is important enough to be part of the synta
> > x.
> 
> I don't think this was forgotten.  Every time it's come up, so far, I've
> successfully argued against including this kind of thing, because of how
> it interacts with forward and backward compatibility.  I think it's
> better to simply recognize the syntactic features you need to recognize,
> instead of also needing to understand the names of collections of those
> features.
> 
>     -- Sandro
> 
>

Received on Saturday, 5 July 2008 15:38:21 UTC