Re: [XAG] New draft Announcement

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