- From: <lee@sq.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 97 22:02:02 EDT
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
Dan is of course perfectly correct here: in the terminology of most standards and specifications, a normative reference to another publication means that everything in that publication applies to this standard, and every implementation has to conform to that publication. The implication is that the referencing standard is incomplete, and you have to read the other application. We already have, I think, a normative reference to ISO 10646 or Unicode. We should not have a normative reference to ISO 8879. Instead, we should have a note that says that every valid XML document will ipso facto conform to ISO 8879, and possibly refer the interested reader to that document. I think, though, that it's just in the way that the terminology is being used. I don't expect that Len wants all XML parser writers to read and understand SGML before starting out on their heroic One Week Journey of Implementation... I recall James Clark at SGML 96 mentioning that it took him a few months to get to the point where he understood the SGML standards well enough to begin coding. I doubt that this is atypical, except that few people can devote themselves to such study full-time... So this fails the "sanity test".... any reference to SGML in the XML spec must not require that people read SGML. Hence, SGML conformance cannot be a normative requirement for XML conformance. Rather, the XML spec must stand alone, but the resulting valid XML documents must always be valid SGML documents. So any reference to SGML in the XML spec must be for interest, not one that forces people to read ISO 8879:1986. I am saying the same thing in multiple ways in the hope that everyone can agree with at least one of them easily, and then see that they're all the same. Lee
Received on Tuesday, 24 June 1997 22:02:05 UTC