RE: Defined sets, accept sets, and <banana> elements

I had an action item, either official or unofficial, to weave a story
like this into the finding.  I think that action is now closed..

Cheers,
Dave 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com [mailto:noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:21 PM
> To: David Orchard
> Cc: Tim Berners-Lee; www-tag@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Defined sets, accept sets, and <banana> elements
> 
> Dave Orchard writes:
> 
> > Tremendous!  This is wonderful.
> 
> Well, thank you!
> 
> > Do you think this would be worthwhile to add to the 
> versioning works, 
> > or is it extra material that takes away from the larger picture?
> 
> Actually, I think it suggests something a bit different.  The 
> short summary of what I concluded is:  defined-set/accept-set 
> adds a lot of value in the case where V1 says that extension 
> content is truly ignored; as best I can tell it doesn't help 
> much in the case where V1 applies some other default semantic 
> to extension content.  So, if I were setting priorities, I 
> would say that the next step would be to find out how 
> important such languages are to users.
> 
> My intuition is that it's very, very common for languages to 
> provide a semantic other than "just ignore";  while HTML 
> itself does use the ignore rule, neither HTML+DOM nor 
> HTML+CSS do.  I strongly suspect that many vertical languages 
> also make extension content available to applications (much 
> as the DOM exposes <banana> elements for HTML), and so on.  
> Insofar as I'm right about that, I think we want to ask 
> ourselves whether we're happy with a core model that seems to 
> say very little about these sorts of extensible languages.  
> If we're still OK with defined/accept, then we should ask 
> whether we also want to tell a story about HTML+CSS, and then 
> finally we can get to the question you're asking, which is 
> whether something derived from the content of my email 
> belongs as an addition to the finding as it stands.  I'd 
> certainly be glad to see it included if it's helpful.
> 
> FWIW:  I still believe that there are alternatives to 
> defined-set/accept-set that would handle in a first class way 
> the many languages in which open content does have a 
> nontrivial semantic.  If I were writing the finding just for 
> my own satisfaction, I would be tempted to explore those 
> models first, and see whether the "ignore extensions" 
> languages don't just fall out as a special case.  Still, if 
> the rest of the TAG is happy with the compromises inherent in 
> defined-set/accept-set, I don't think I'd stand in the way.  
> It's a nice, clean model for the "ignore" languages.  Still, 
> I'm not convinced that define-set/accept-set sheds very much 
> light on the cases that I think tend to be most misunderstood 
> by users.  So, let's see what everyone else thinks.
> 
> --------------------------------------
> Noah Mendelsohn
> IBM Corporation
> One Rogers Street
> Cambridge, MA 02142
> 1-617-693-4036
> --------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2007 00:08:19 UTC