Re: multiple schema proposed recs

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>

>Republishing a Proposed Recommendation two weeks after its release to make
>a change like that feels like, well, an April Fools' joke.

I think everyone on the WG regrets having to do this: it only came up at the
last moment.  Numbers and time/dates both have been very difficult to get
right (indeed, we basically gave up on producing an acceptable type
heirarchy for dates and times for XML Schemas 1.0).

We felt it was not acceptable to have something called "number" in XSLT
being a different thing from the thing called "number" in XML Schemas.
Users would be too confused, and it was worth having a strategic retreat.
Of course, we are still left with the fact that "decimal" may not be a very
good name for our base number. (I think recent comments on XML-DEV of people
being put off by perceived inconsistancies in W3C specs probably influenced
the decision; people seem to be expecting the W3C brand will be conceptually
seamless, the optimists.)

Any changes in PRs are of course pretty borderline: if we hadn't been
restoring the most recent name we would have probably had to go back to
Working Draft status, which would have let the punters down far more than
this correction will have.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe