RE: Extreme specwriting? (was RE: SAX Filters for Namespace Proce ssing)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title: Extreme specwriting? (was RE: SAX Filters for Namespace Processing)

Which is precisely what the SGML developers did.   SGML did not start out

excruciatingly complex.  It takes years of development and refactoring to

do that.   XML beat it's record for that, but at least the complexities are

in different documents

No one is purely right in this discussion.   Again, spec/standard references have

value.  If you can refer to only that parts you implement, and those parts

can be implemented stand-alone, you can test what you did.   In SGML,

we only had one document for most of it's history, and drafts of others.

That packed all the features into one reference and that lead to the

term "the SGML Nazis" being used by developers who only implemented

pieces of it.    So part of this issue is clean references with everyone involved

being fully knowledgeable that what is not referenced is just as important,

and further, just as valid as what is.  IOW, it is important to be able to

say and be precise in the saying that a piece of software is or isn't

"namespace-aware".  Part of saying that is features-negotiation and

part of that might be part of where efforts like .NET are going.  

You don't send a rifle squad in with artillery.   You send them in

with a radio.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

more XML implementors should admit that the emperor is "sartorially challenged" and just implement those parts of the specs that make sense, and call a subset a subset.  This might limit interoperability in principle, but I for one would rather work around an explicitly missing feature than to find (after wasted nights of debugging) that the implementers interpreted the spec differently.