> -----Original Message-----
>
From: David E. Cleary [mailto:davec@progress.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 9:25
AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: XML Schema Test
Collection open for contributions
>
> There are no secret
documents privy to the WG
> that contains the silver bullet of
implementing Schema.
Right, there are no secrets or conspiracies. But
there are a lot of mailing list archives, meeting minutes,etc available to any
W3C members that MAY contain bits of information critical to "correct"
implementation that never got written down in the spec. I'm remembering
four years of working on the DOM WG -- this stuff happens, and you only learn
about it when someone tries a "clean room" implementation from the spec and
nothing but the spec. Goodwill and hard work aren't enough ... some things
also require time before you can KNOW that the spec contains all the information
needed to implement in an interoperable way.
For example, XML 1.0 ) had a "secret" assumption inherited from SGML that attributes are un-ordered. I know that we in the DOM working group (mostly old SGML types) "just knew" that attributes were un-ordered ... and were astonished to find (once DOM interoperability problems surfaced) that it was not in the XML 1.0 spec. (It has been added to the updated XML 1.0, as I understand). It's THIS type of thing, not some "secret documents containing silver bullets" that I'm concerned about.