Re: XML 1.0 priorities

I am replying to this from the point of view of an implementer of POC
tools. It will be critical that by July 1 the language is
supported with a reasonable amount of prototypes that show the concepts
to be both implementable and useful.

In message <199705162253.PAA15818@boethius.eng.sun.com> bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM (Jon Bosak) writes:
> We have just been given five fairly important proposals to consider.
> What you don't know, but will find out in a couple of days when he
> gets to his destination in France, is that Tim Bray is about to drop a
> roughly equal number of questions related to xml-link into this group.
> Given our objective of having fairly solid versions of xml-lang and
> xml-link for 1.0 out by July 1, it seems fairly obvious that we are

AIUI! 6 weeks from now.  I assume that the (so far undisclosed) xml-link
proposals will also vie for priority.

> going to have to make some decisions about what gets dealt with first.
> We don't have to make the cut right now, but it would help if in the
> course of discussing Jean's proposals you also indicated whether you
> feel that the feature in question is one that needs to be addressed in
> XML 1.0 or whether it falls into the class of things that can be added
> later.

In the absence of the xml-link proposals, I comment on the feasibility of
getting SD[1-5] finalised and demonstrated by July 1:

SD1 (short tags).  This is trivial for parser writers, but I am no longer in
favour of it because (a) I suspect some XML documents will be hand-authored
(or at least hand-edited) - a rich source of confusion - and (b) error
recovery for missing endtags in WF documents would be effectively error
creation.

SD2 (structured attributes).  This seems to require either (a) rewriting
SGML and the parsers or (b) doing some fairly cunning pre-parser manipulation.
I cannot see a working prototype by July 1, even if we agreed the syntax
today, since there would be too many implied semantics to be resolved
quickly.  It would also break the Esis and ElementTree output and although
it might be representable by groves, there are not yet any XML applications 
that use groves?

SD3 (Data types).  I don't think there are syntactic problems here, although
I suspect the namespace of potential types is sufficiently large that we 
would debate for some time.  (Date?, Date+Time?, DateTime?, etc. and there
will also have to be discussion about floats - precision, overflow behaviour,
format specification, etc.)  I wouldn't object to a placeholder and make as 
much progress as possible.

SD4 (Schema format).  I am in favour of a DTD that describes DTDs (JUMBO has a
class DTDDTD to manage and display DTDs) and I'd welcome development here.
I see this as an application outside of the syntax, and possibly outside 
the language, but would be happy to explore it.

SD5 (Name space).  This is urgent but I suspect it will take a week or two
for the discussion to settle down.  It looks as if it will have to impact
on the parsers (or require a pre-parser) and there are non-trivial issues 
about how the semantics for a colliding tag are carried into the application.
So I can't easily see it being implemented by July 1 although I'm happy to
help in the effort since it's so important.

	P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection
Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/

Received on Friday, 16 May 1997 20:02:18 UTC