RE: unclarity about xml:lang position

At 12:48 PM 11/18/98 PST, Yaron Goland wrote:

Maybe I'm the one who is slow. It appears that you agree that xml:lang may
appear anywhere in the request body.  Right?

It further appears you disagree that the DAV spec is unclear.  I say it is,
because I know of at least one person who read it and misinterpreted it.
The spec says, I quote:

"Language tagging information in the
property's value (in the "xml:lang" attribute, if present) MUST be
persistently stored along with the property, and MUST be subsequently
retrievable using PROPFIND."

and this led the implementor to conclude the xml:lang has to be in the
VALUE in particular (as opposed to appearing in any position governing the
value.).
I can understand how he might take this position.  It's wrong, but I
understand it.

I say that it sufficies to show unclarity if even one implementor
misunderstood the spec.  (I'm not talking about a casual, clueless reader.
I'm talking about a person skilled enough to implement WebDAV.)

Fixing the spec to be specific on the point is not difficult.


>The
>requirement for responses is semantic, not syntactic, equivalence.

This is also worth emphasizing in the spec.  Surely you've noticed the
large number of questions on the list about 'byte for byte equality' etc.

>Of course we could clarify the spec, but short of providing an entire XML
>tutorial we must assume that the reader is familiar with XML. This isn't an
>issue for DAV, this is an issue for XML.

Perhaps you have also noticed the disagreements about whether XML
attributes are part of the WebDAV data model?

Let me put it clearly.  Do you (or anyone else) OBJECT to adding to spec
language such as Jim W proposed:

"Language tagging information
in the property's value, or with scope that affects XML elements in the
property's value (following scoping rules for the "xml:lang" attribute, if
present) MUST ..."

Jim

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 1998 16:47:39 UTC