xml-dev - Re: Realistic proposals to the W3C?

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Clark C. Evans wrote:

> > CLARITY OF SPECS
> > 
> > Insist on an open source reference implementation?
> 
> Absolutely.  Only, call me strange, but I would go 
> one step further and say that the reference 
> implementation *is* the recommendation and that 
> any other explanatory documents are secondary.  

No! Please god no.

We'd end up with every spec coming out in Java. And those of us who don't
work in Java would have a very hard time converting the code to something
we can actually use.

I'm actually not too hot on a reference implementation, simply because you
can only do it in one language, and thats unlikely to be my language of
choice (of course I wouldn't complain if there was a ref.impl shipped with
a REC). What I'd rather see is some of the trickier concepts in some of
the specs converted to psuedo code. XSLT's template conflict resolution
might be a good example. Took me a while to grok what it was getting at,
and psuedo code in some places can really help.

-- 
<Matt/>

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