Action Item to Define Best Practice

I was assigned an action item to define a best practice to address the 
problem I identified during my review of XINCLUDE for conformance to 
SpecGL.   The problem had to do with not knowing if various features, like 
deprecated features, were present and thus not being able to determine if 
the absence of the identification of these features, as required by SpecGL, 
was non-conformance or non applicability.

After careful review, I decided that there was already a best practice that 
solves this problem - it is the best practice for providing an ICS.

The existing ICS best practice asks for implementations to indicate which 
capabilities and optional features have been implemented.  In our telcon 
discussion we agreed that this would be a possible solution to the problem 
but that we would need some way to make the ICS accessible from the 
spec.  However, the existing best practice specifically says that "This 
Good Practice suggests that the specification itself include an ICS proforma."

It seems to me that following this best practice would take care of this 
problem.  Thus, there is no need for a new best practice.

Happy holidays.

Mark


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Mark Skall
Chief, Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division
Information Technology Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8970
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8970

Voice: 301-975-3262
Fax:   301-590-9174
Email: skall@nist.gov
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Received on Thursday, 23 December 2004 15:18:36 UTC