RE: [REVISED] My user experience of the user experience workshop

> I want to add that since I wrote the note below I have read 
> the formal specification and my feeling about that document 
> is that it does more harm than good - especially since the 
> committee made it clear at the workshop that the document is 
> not considered a valid account of the standard. This is all
> the more concern since I heard XPath and XQuery made use of
> the spec.

The XQuery and XPath specifications do not make any reference (either
normative or informative, or even as background reading) to the formal
specification that you mention. Some of the members of the XQuery WG may
well have read it and used it to educate themselves, but that doesn't create
a dependency.
> 
> I guess I am puzzled as to why the committee did not follow
> the precedent set by the XML standard and wonder what the
> W3C broad position is - surely a recomendation regarding 
> formal specification for all the standards is appropriate.
> A common mathematical basis and algebra in the standards 
> would seem useful to me.

Working Groups are staffed by people with their own ideas, experience, and
skills, and a directive of this kind that didn't match the needs of the
particular WG and the skills of its members would achieve nothing.

I have to say that my own experience of formal specifications (both inside
and outside W3C) is that they invariably lag behind the informal
specification by months, and in most cases are never completed. They also
contain more bugs than the informal specification, because there are very
few people with the time and the skills to read the specifications and spot
the errors. In the case of the XQuery formal specification, there are a few
external reviewers (for example, from universities) reporting bugs in the
formal specification, but they tend not to be interested in the messier
parts of the XML world (stuff like namespaces, whitespace, and relative
URIs) which is where the bugs tend to hide. The people writing the formal
specification have discovered bugs in the informal spec while writing the
formal version, so the exercise has been worthwhile, but it's left us with
the problem of two specs that are almost certainly inconsistent with each
other.

My own preference when writing specs is for "formal English". Writing a
backwards-E rather than "there exists" does not make the spec any more
precise or less ambiguous, it just makes it accessible to a smaller
readership.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

Received on Monday, 27 June 2005 21:43:34 UTC