Re: What do we standardize?

/ Richard Tobin <richard@inf.ed.ac.uk> was heard to say:
| I was going to reply to Jeni's message, but realised that I need to
| address a rather wider issue: what are we going to standarize?
|
| It seems natural to me to divide the problem into several parts:
|
| - the pipeline language itself.  I call an implementation of this
|   a "pipeline engine";

Yep, I want one of those :-)

| - a set of standard components, such as XSLT and XInclude;

I think we'll need to define a set of components. I'm not sure which
ones will be required and which will be optional. I can imagine that
there are folks who will want an XQuery component, and
interoperability would be improved by having a standard one, but that
doesn't mean I think every conformant processor should have to support
XQuery.

| - a framework for writing additional components that are interoperable
|   with other suppliers' pipeline engines and components;

I'm not sure I want to go there. When the XSLT WG proposed a standard
API for extension functions, the community pushed back.

| - a component description language that would specify such things as
|   the number of inputs and outputs a component has, what parameters it
|   takes, and what infoset extensions it needs.

That's an interesting possibility.

| I separated the third and fourth points because I think the component
| description will be useful even if you only have standard components.
| For example, a pipeline consistency checker or graphical interface for
| building pipelines could use them.

Yep.

| I think we will find it easiest to first standardise only the first
| two, and in any case there should be a level of conformance that
| allows systems that only provide the first two.  In this case, what
| flows between components need not be specified, since it is internal
| to the implementation.

Exactly.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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