RE: Infoset consistency between versions

I agree with everything you said.  I was only trying to point out the
connection between changing the namespace for a spec and revising it.

/paulc

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada 
17 Eleanor Drive, Nepean, Ontario K2E 6A3 
Tel: (613) 225-5445 Fax: (425) 936-7329 
<mailto:pcotton@microsoft.com> 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 2:45 PM
> To: www-tag@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Infoset consistency between versions
> 
> 
> Paul Cotton wrote:
> 
> > BTW, another interesting question is when should a revised
specification
> > introduce a new namespace?  From my view if a specification is being
> > revised and its namespace does not change, then I would assume that
> > there or no "cascading impacts" in the revision and the only changes
> > being included are editorial errata.
> 
> This is a difficult and important issue, but I question whether it's
> possible to write down a set of rules you can follow mechanically.
For
> example, suppose there's an XHTML 2, and 3, and 4, and they all have
the
>   "h1" element.  Some application classes are going to want to know
not
> only whether it's XHTML 1 or 2, but whether it's 1.03 or 1.02.
Others
> (renderers, crawlers, indexers, probably the vast majority) have the
> semantics of XHTML "h1" wired-in and just want to know whether this is
> an HTML "h1" or not.  So there are good reasons both to rev and not to
> rev the namespace.
> 
> So I think the community of language designers is facing tough design
> choices, and probably all the TAG can do is write a principle saying
> that they have to face up to them and think about them seriously and
> justify their namespace-revving decisions.
> 
> Anyone who's worked seriously in content-management systems knows that
> versioning is in general a horrible rats'-nest of issues with
semantics
> all over the map and little commonality of practice. -Tim

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 16:55:32 UTC