Re: Remarks on W3C Editor's Draft 6 August 2007

Norman Walsh wrote:
> / Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> was heard to say:
> | All of the options that are boolean for the step library need to be
> | reworked slightly to make sure they allow the value "true" and "false" as well.
> 
> Yes, and I don't know what to say about steps that generate true or false answers.
> I'm inclined to say "yes" and "no", but only because it's more consistent with
> what we had historically.

I think it's going to be very hard for people to use options that have 
yes/no values, because creating yes or no from XPath expressions is 
difficult.

For example, how would you do the following pseudo-code.

<p:add-xml-base>
   <p:option name="all" select="...if /test then 'yes' else 'no'..." />
</p:add-xml-base>

(I know how to do it -- you use substring() on 'yesno' and rely on 
conversion of true to 1 -- I just think it's unreasonable for authors to 
have to do that.)

I think we should switch to using 'true'/'false' everywhere for option 
values, since that's what boolean true/false get converted to as 
strings. If we do that, it makes sense (to me) to switch to true/false 
everywhere.

Cheers,

Jeni
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 15:54:23 UTC