Re: On schema quality and schema limitations

Hello Bjoern,

Le ven 09/04/2004 à 07:23, Bjoern Hoehrmann a écrit :
>   While trying to figure out what the lexical space of this "charset"
> thing is (which I need to know for my Charmod Fundamentals and XHTML
> Print review and probably for implementation of XHTML Print in the
> MarkUp Validator...) I somehow ended up writing 
> 
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2004Apr/0043.html

Very interesting reading! I expect you'll turn most of its contents into
comments for the XHTML Modularization SE?

> which appears to be a followup comment on
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2003Sep/0002.html
> which you track as CR-29 on
>   http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/2004/02/cr-issues.html

Do you mean by that your mail should be formally added to our issues
list as another set of points to solve? ie, is there any other issues
that you would like to see open as a follow-up to your email?

Getting back to your email, you raise a point that I think is really
worth trying to solve in W3C as a quality process: how to check that the
formal language (defined in schema, dtd, ...) matches the
English-written specification ; matching has several aspects:
* does the formal language add constraint not expressed in the spec?
* does the formal language fail to check constraints expressed in the
specification?
* does the formal language contradicts the specification?

I think the second question should be recast into "does the formal
specification uses all its expressive power to match the constraints set
in the specification?", which is one of the issues that you raise in
your comments.

All in all, the most important point to check is probably the third one:
how can we make it so that an XML Schema doesn't impose constraints that
contradicts what the specification says. Have you tried to check whether
a conformant XHTML document is declared as XML Schema invalid, based on
the errors you found?

Thanks,

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