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- From: Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@w3.org>
- To: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>
- Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:16:42 +0200
On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 08:33:23PM +0100, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> 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.
yes I second that. sorry but all attempts at simply building "reference
code" was just an exercize in insanity ! I would not make the software
normative ...
> 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.
s/And those of us who don't work in Java// :-)
> 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.
Having implementations ready and checking that they behave well is
very important, having ones with source available is a definite plus
and real free software nirvana ! But turning those into the spec is
IMHO the worse thing to do, nearly all code have bugs, would the bugs
be the specs ? Try to estimate the number of revision of XML-1.0 from
that time to now if we had to fix all bugs one by one in a reference
implementation used as the specification !
Daniel
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