Comments on Last Call WD of SSML

Hi,

I have read the last call WD and here are a few comments (mostly
minor), from an XML purist point of view, as you'll probably find.

1. Why is the xml declaration mandatory? This goes against the XML
   conformance rules, and it means that a standard XML parser could
   not be used as it would accept the absence of a declaration. Since
   this is mentioned twice, I imagine that the WG had a good reason
   to do so, and it would be nice to find why in the spec.

1.5. Similarly, why is the SSML namespace declaration mandatory? 

1.6 Section 3.1 seems to mandate the use of xsi as the prefix of
   schemaLocation.
   
2. Why do all the examples link to the schema? It makes them 
   less easy to read, and gives the impression that schemaLocation
   is mandatory.

3. I have trouble understanding this, in 2.1.5: "It is an error if a
   value for alphabet is specified that is not known or cannot be
   applied by an SSML processor.", where "error" is defined as a violation
   of the spec.

   The test above indicates that values other than 'ipa' are allowed
   for alphabet, so this would mean that if a processor doesn't
   understand the value "xyz" (which a SSML producer has just come up
   with), then the processor violates the spec?

4. in 2.2.1, the age attribute is defined as being of type "integer".
   that should be positive integer. 

   The style used for '(integer)' seems to indicate a formal reference
   to a type. If it were, this would be more accurately described as
   XML Schema's nonNegativeInteger. Ditto for the variant attribute which would
   have to refer to xsd:integer

5. "Durations follow the "Times" attribute format from the [CSS2]
   specification". I think this should be phrased as: "Durations
   follow the <time> basic data type from the [CSS2] specification".

6. The definition of number in 2.2.4 
   "A number is a simple floating point value without exponentials."
   insert 'positive'. (sorry to be pedantic ;-)

7. the name of the <mark> element seems like an element of type ID.
   why not define it as such (see XML 1.0). This would give you the
   extra check (from the XML parser) that a name must not appear more
   than once.

8. desc seems to be the only element where no examples are shown.

9. the 5th paragraph of 3.1 "It is recommended ..." ends with a ':'

10. Stand-Alone documents. What is the difference between that 
    and xml standalone documents?

Hoping this helps,

Max.

Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2002 15:36:05 UTC