- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 09:33:10 +1000
- To: wai-xtech <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Another alternative worth mentioning, for the sake of completeness, is that of writing a guidelines document with precise statements of principle and testable requirements, but adding an "interpretation" clause which asserts that in situations not covered by the provisions of the specification, implementors are expected to adopt solutions which accord with the principles and rationale provided, guided by the examples discussed in the document. The conformance scheme would require any such strategies to be documented and justified as part of the conformance claim. My main concern with the current document is that, especially in regard to "semantics", the guidelines reiterate the problem instead of addressing it. If they are to serve as genuine guidelines, then they should provide some means whereby a language developer can decide what semantic distinctions to draw in establishing element and attribute definitions. In Charles' music markup language, for example, what semantic distinctions ought to be included? On what basis, from an access standpoint, should the decision be made, and how can the adequacy of such choices be verified? Of course, the guidelines could easily be amended to cover music explicitly, but this is not the point. Rather, my argument is that we can't presume to have covered all of the possible types of content that can be represented in XML, so that the developer needs to be offered guidance in making the requisite decisions, if our document is to serve as a set of guidelines. If, in the other alternative, it is a "principles" document, then the need for specificity is somewhat reduced, though even then it would be desirable to give some guidance as to how to assess the importance of various semantic distinctions.
Received on Thursday, 19 September 2002 19:33:19 UTC