Re: more grist

[Ben Trafford <ben@legendary.org>]

At 01:26 PM 3/1/2001 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>You might as well complain that your desk dictionary has no standardized
>extension mechanism.  Get a bigger dictionary, that's all.

         I don't believe the analogy applies. In the case of InfoSet, or 
any other standard, to just "extend my dictionary," I'd need to:

         1) Get the Working Group to agree on it.
         2) Write up a spec defining the new features, and pass that 
through the Working Group.
         3) Get all the InfoSet-compliant parsers updated.

         On the other hand, if I had a standard extension method, anybody 
could add to the dictionary in a standards-compliant, interoperable 
fashion. Thus, James Clark could write an extension specific to TREX, and 
then a standard extension to InfoSet-friendly tools, using an API. Half the 
problem with InfoSet is that it doesn't talk directly to a standard API, 
like DOM. See what I mean? XML's extensibility doesn't extend to the 
processing side of things, at this point. Anybody who wants to add anything 
doesn't have any kind of standard extension method to do it. And with 
xsl-script and other such silliness, the W3C is stripping the extensibility 
that does exist.

>>          2) InfoSet has no conception of scaled conformance.
>
>Not for lack of trying.  But the Core WG concluded that there was no
>base level of conformance that was nonarbitrary and would suit everyone,
>so we explicitly stopped trying.

         Another example of why W3C is becoming less and less relevant. W3C 
Schema is another perfect example of how politics messed up a relatively 
good idea.

--->Ben