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

On 28 April 2012 11:54, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

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> On 28 April 2012 09:45, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:
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>> 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.
>> >
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>> 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.
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>> 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.
>>
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> Good point, I should mark all the fields in the spec as mandatory.
>

Done.


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>> 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.
>>
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