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   Re: [xml-dev] [Fwd: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications]

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On Sat, 2002-10-26 at 15:00, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 10:26 AM +0200 10/26/02, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> 
> >If that had been the case, other specs such as XPath 1.0 could have
> >refered to "the latest definition of a XML Name" instead of nominatively
> >quote "the current definition of a XML Name in XML 1.0".
> 
> I think this is a disaster for interoperability. Currently, I know 
> what an XPath 1.0 processor does. I know what it considers to be a 
> name. Under this scheme different XPath processors would produce 
> different results when applied to the same data depending on what 
> version of XML Names was in use.

I do think that the current situation is a disaster for extensibility.

I won't come over to the fact that I think XML doesn't deserve its "X",
but the XML 1.1 is showing that the XML spec can't be updated witout
having to update most of the specs built on it. We have "modular"
specifications wich are only modular by name! 

> Maybe you could come up with some way of specifying which version of 
> XML Names an expression required, but that would seem difficult in 
> the context of XPath, especially when you mix it with versions of 
> namespaces, versions of URIs, and anything else for which you might 
> need to identify the latest version.

That means that we would need to define "packages of specifications" to
keep only the most common and/or most useful combinations.

This is a complexity we've more or less learned to manage with APIs, I
am just proposing to try to see how we can apply the same techniques to
specifications.

Eric

>
-- 
Curious about Relax NG? My book in progress is waiting your review!
                                   http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------





 

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