- From: <david_marston@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:03:13 -0400
- To: www-qa-wg@w3.org
There is a dialog underway that started with this: >>>Technique >>>3. If your technology is made of multiple individual recommendations, >>>create a table of content item for Conformance, and explain that the >>>Conformance section is in another document. Karl and I agree that every Recommendation would benefit from the TOC entry pointing to conformance. I think that when a document is separate from another with which it was originally thought to be associated, it takes on a life of its own. Schema Part 2 [1] is a classic example. Although it was written to be part of Schema, it has become the W3C's official list of datatypes. Thus, its Conformance implications do not simply pass upward to Schema Part 1 any more. It has its own chapter on Conformance, but that chapter unfortunately does not anticipate other Recs citing it normatively, which is now the case for F&O. [2] In a situation like that, the "lower" document it (Schema Part 2 in this case) can't get by with a one-sentence deferral of its conformance rules to a particular "upper" document (Schema Part 1 or F&O). A document that is 100% informative might get by with one sentence, though interestingly, Schema Part 0 doesn't. [3] Based on Karl's feedback, I think that the techniques about how one Rec sets conformance expectations for an embracing technology in another Rec is indeed about the content rather than about whether to have a Section or just a TOC entry. All those points should be somewhere in SpecGL. The last remaining issue about the above Technique 3 is that it is written as if the separate document will not take on a life of its own. How about this? 3. Each Recommendation addresses conformance. Those that don't specify behavior of a Class of Product may simply say that they are informative, but beware: even defining terms or stating principles can be normative if some other document could cite the terms or principles normatively. If your WG issues several Recommendations and some refer normatively to others in the set, try to isolate a Class of Product in each Rec and anticipate that other Recs may cite any individual Rec normatively. (Example: Schema Part 2 was originally developed as the document on data types for XML Schema, but it is now cited normatively to specify the data types for XPath 2.0 and XQuery.) .................David Marston [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/ [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-xpath-functions-20040723/#constructor-functions-for-xsd-types [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-0-20010502/#conformance
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