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

On 28 April 2012 09:45, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Good point, I should mark all the fields in the spec as 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.
>