Re: rewrite of TOC checkpoints.

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Lofton Henderson wrote:

> Perhaps a definition of navigation mechanism would help, or a
> limitation on what is considered valid.  Something with some sort of
> directness and linkage, as opposed to a instruction to the reader to
> "grep on all MUST occurrences".
>
> (Hmm... having said that, a smart "complete-sentence" grep with line
> numbers and maybe even links -- as opposed to the standard unix
> single-line dumb 'grep' -- doesn't sound bad.  I.e., the navigation
> mechanism could be some extra-document process that extracts and
> presents one or more information-specific tabulations or TOCs.)

We should be careful when allowing external tools such as a navigation
mechanisms to satisfy a checkpoint. It is always possible to implement
such a tool. A WG can consider the checkpoint satisfied just because
somebody has announced the first version of a tool. However, since
SpecGL does not control the external implementation, it may not
satisfy SpecGL intentions. As an extreme example, think of a for-fee
proprietary navigation mechanism sold by a third party.

Alex.

P.S. While being appropriately dumb, Unix grep can display multi-line
     context and line numbers (e.g., grep -n -3 MUST rfc.txt).

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Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 11:12:06 UTC