Re: ABNF srgs

Thank you for your comments.  My apologies that is has taken so long to reply.  Developing two forms of grammar for transport was debated
internally and determined to be requisite to address the needs of the development community in this space.  The best summary of that
discussion is addressed in the "2nd Last Call Disposition of Comments".

http://www.w3.org/2002/06/speech-grammar-comments.html#GC08-1

Certainly pre-transformation before transport is an option developers have (as is the use of any source format if it is transformed in to
the XML or ABNF form of SRGS before transport), but not an option we wanted to enforce upon the developer community.  In particular, the
belief is that the XML format is verbose to the point that it impinges on developers doing hand-authoring for prototyping or even full
application development.  We very much did not want to require use of transformative tools on the development side for simple
prototyping.

I hope that response adequately addresses your questions.  If not, feel free to reply to this thread again and we can continue to the
discussion.

Brad


> ABNF srgs
>
> From: Dan Kohn (dan@dankohn.com)
> Date: Sat, Nov 30 2002
>
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>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 21:30:40 -0800
> Message-ID: <138AA78F80DCE84B8EE424399FFBF9C904F93D@exchange.ad.skymv.com>
> From: "Dan Kohn" <dan@dankohn.com>
> To: <s-tryphonas@tellme.com>, <b-porter@tellme.com>
> Cc: <ietf-xml-mime@imc.org>, <www-voice@w3.org>
> Subject: ABNF srgs
>
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-porter-srgs-media-reg-01.txt
>
> I'm not sure than I'm opposed to this I-D, though it is certainly
> unusual for a non-XML MIME type to heavily reference RFC 3023.  However,
> could you please explain the reasoning behind encoding the same
> on-the-wire grammar with two different (but cross-convertible) syntaxes:
> ABNF and XML?
>
> It seems like a huge amount of work for little or no gain.  Certainly in
> the context of MIME, there is much better experience in transporting XML
> documents (and dealing with related i18n and encoding issues) than the
> ABNF grammars that this I-D registers.  Plus, to quote RFC 1958,
> Architectural Principles of the Internet, Section 3.2:
>
>   "If there are several ways of doing the same thing, choose one."
>
> I assume this has been thoroughly debated but I cannot find the thread
> at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-voice/>.  I see at
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/voice-intro/#gram>:  "We anticipate that
> development tools will be constructed that provide the familiar ABNF
> format to developers, and enable XML software to manipulate the XML
> grammar format."  I can understand that developers find ABNF easier to
> read and write.
>
> However, is it really necessary for the ABNF format to be released into
> the wild (i.e., sent over MIME protocols)?  Wouldn't it improve
> simplicity and interoperability to say that ABNF MUST first be converted
> to XML before transport?  More strongly, wouldn't the document be more
> clear, straightforward and interoperable to say that XML is the
> on-the-wire syntax for the grammar, and then separately to specify
> reversible conversion back and forth between XML and ABNF?
>
> In that case, this I-D would not need to be registered.
>
>           - dan
> --
> Dan Kohn <mailto:dan@dankohn.com>
> <http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>
>
>   Randomly generated quote:
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in
> practice, there is.  - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
>
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Received on Friday, 21 March 2003 11:59:02 UTC