Re: CSS examples of umbrella specifications?

Le vendredi 29 avril 2005 à 10:45 -0400, Karl Dubost a écrit :
> Le 28 avr. 2005, à 17:28, boland@nist.gov a écrit :
> > Are the following examples of umbrella specifications?
> > CSS Print Profile , CSS Mobile Profile 1.0, CSS TV Profile 1.0
> 
> They are profiles but not Umbrella specifications in my understanding 
> of it.

As for myself, I tend to think of them as Umbrella specifications.
Taking the definition we currently have for this concept in ViS, we
have:
"Some specifications, denoted below as umbrella specifications, create
all the requirements of the technology they define by simply grouping
requirements of existing specifications in a well-defined manner."

I think that's exactly what these profiles do... More generally, I think
most profiles are umbrella specifications (e.g. SVG profiles, XForms
Basic profile, XHTML + SVG + MathML Profile, XHTML Basic) according to
this definition.

I think I was the one proposing this definition, and it may not reflect
the original intent behind "umbrella specifications", but if so, we need
to fix it.

>  An Umbrella specification would be a "CSS 3.0" document which 
> ties everything together, explaining the intent of the technology as a 
> whole, what are the dependencies, what are the different profiles (with 
> the possibility of new profiles and how to create them, with which 
> constraints), etc, and  to define the conformance or to explain how the 
> conformance works in the different documents.

Karl, any way to find a definition that would match this but not the
other profiles? FWIW, I think defining a concept on which we rely so
little (i.e. I don't think we say anything new or interesting about
them) seems risky to me. Maybe we should proceed the other way around:
what is it that we want to convey about what type of specifications?

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org