- From: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 14:27:24 -0700 (MST)
- To: Dimitris Dimitriadis <dimitris@ontologicon.com>
- cc: www-qa@w3.org
On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Dimitris Dimitriadis wrote:
> Should we control the specification markup alone? (D. Marston, D.
> Dimitriadis) Or have a fair markup and a fair adressing scheme? (A.
> Rousskov, S. Boag)? Perfect markup would solve our problems, but may
> be difficult to bring about (however, conclusions from the
> specification authoring survey render a uniform markup idea fairly
> plausible)
You might be mixing several distinct points/opinions here:
- nobody is against better markup, of course;
if somebody can improve xmlspec, they should do it!
there is an obvious tradeoff between markup
permissiveness (making it easy for editors to add new
markup "features") and uniformity (making it easy for 3rd
party tools to work with specs)
- uniform markup is, of course, _possible_ to enforce for
new W3C specs; no reason to survey current specifications
to assert that
- no markup is perfect -- no markup is sufficient to
express everything a test tool or a 3rd party document
would want to extract or cite;
this assertion is true because the things we test/cite are
not limited to what spec authors marked as things that
can be tested/cited; thus, we MUST NOT rely on
[future] xmlspec alone and MAY propose a domain-specific
addressing scheme
This leads to two distinct primary (but optional) activities:
- improving xmlspec (including rewriting it if needed)
- proposing an addressing scheme (including adopting
existing ones such as XPointer, if possible)
W3C survey and discussions can help to decide whether any of the above
activities worth spending W3C resources on.
Alex.
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Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 16:27:28 UTC