RE: intertwined specs

[Ben Trafford <ben@legendary.org>]

At 01:03 PM 2/16/2001 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 11:24 AM 2/16/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> >No.  I'd be unnerved if that weren't happening.
> >It would mean the specs are incantations for
> >magical events.
>
>2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
>9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
>10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
>
>I think it's reasonable to suggest that XML - read broadly as the then XML
>family of specs - lived up to that in 1998.  I think most of those, except
>perhaps 2, 10, and maybe 9, don't apply to the current and developing XML
>family of specs.
>
>For those of us who really savored the goals above, I'm not sure this
>qualifies as progress. (And no, XML 1.0 hasn't changed much, but 'XML' has.)

         Simon,

         I think you're oversimplifying the matter, while making a 
generally good point. Yes, the W3C ought to publish a roadmap of 
interdependencies between the specifications, and try to minimize the 
dependencies as much as possible. However, two things are clear from 
implementation:

         1) Lots of people use plain XML for their tasks, without ever 
dealing with the more complicated stuff, except for maybe DOM.
         2) People who want more oomph out of XML than the base spec 
provides will pay for it. How? Because more potent applications of XML 
require more processing information than base spec provides. We need 
Infoset. We need XPath. We need some sort of schema that's more powerful 
than DTDs.

         At least, this has been my experience.

         The upshot is that I believe it would behoove our friends at W3C 
to publish the roadmap I mentioned above, because it would help developers 
choose which specs to go with, and give them an idea of what the whole 
development picture would look like.

--->Ben Trafford