Re: making the webcredits.org spec more strict about 'source' and 'destination' fields.

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've uploaded some changes, in line with feedback.

> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html :
> > I chose HTML not to be a programming
> > language because I wanted different programs to do different things with it:
> > present it differently, extract tables of contents, index it, and so on.
>

This is different though. it's good for human-readable content that
different systems can present it in different ways, and the meaning of
 a 'h2' tag in html is approximate and not exact. but we do not want
the meaning of 'amount' in a webcredit to be hand-wavy.

there is a lot of implicit meaning in the current spec. like for
instance the suggestion that the name 'webcredits' has something to do
with credit. in the current spec, the question whether that is a
naming coincidence is left out-of-scope.

Also, it is not clear if any or all of the fields mentioned are mandatory.

Also, it is not clear if there is any meaning to be assigned to the
'currency' field. Right now, an app can be webcredits-compliant, but
not interpret the currency as the unit in which the 'amount' is
expressed. So I could write an app that only deals with euros, and if
it receives a webcredit that for 5000 Yen, or with the currency field
missing altogether, it will interpret it as 5000 euros.

The spec has to mention not only the syntax (and in a more precise way
than now) but also the interpretation.

If you write a spec for human-readable documents, you can leave this
stuff out-of-scope, but in a spec for machine-readable document you
cannot.

Received on Saturday, 28 April 2012 07:45:57 UTC