Re: Testable assertion tagging for W3C specifications

> In my experience the human-readability of a spec
> is an important factor in its successful uptake by the community.

I don't think it's totally either one or the other.  And most specs are
better anyway if they are declarative, in my experience.  Also, there is
the path that Schema took, which is to provide a tutorial.

> I'm not sure it merits immediate adoption.

It depends on what baby steps may be taken.  I believe a large amount of
work lies in wait for the creation of test suites for XPath 2.0/XQuery
1.0/XSLT 2.0.  We may be able to save a lot of person hours by taking some
simple markup steps now.

-scott




                                                                                                                                           
                      Tim Bray                                                                                                             
                      <tbray@textuality.com        To:       scott_boag@us.ibm.com                                                         
                      >                            cc:       Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@datadirect-technologies.com>,                  
                      Sent by:                      spec-prod@w3.org, w3c-query-editors@w3.org, www-qa@w3.org, (bcc: Scott                 
                      w3c-query-editors-req         Boag/Cambridge/IBM)                                                                    
                      uest@w3.org                  Subject:  Re: Testable assertion tagging for W3C specifications                         
                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                           
                      05/09/2002 01:39 PM                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                           




scott_boag@us.ibm.com wrote:

> Too often we think
> of the specification as prose.  What it really must be is

This is a strong assertion that may be true but probably requires some
supporting evidence.  In my experience the human-readability of a spec
is an important factor in its successful uptake by the community.  XML
1.0 is admittedly a counter-example, but should I ever undertake another
large-scale core-technology spec editing assignment, I'd put a lot more
energy into the prose.

Having said all that, the testable-assertions hypothesis probably merits
serious investigation.  I'm not sure it merits immediate adoption. -Tim

Received on Friday, 10 May 2002 07:49:45 UTC