Re: [xml-dev] Quote of the day

[Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>]

Michael and all, hello.

It isn't just On 12 May 2022, at 17:26, Michael Kay wrote:

> My take on this is that the job of a spec is to communicate, very clearly and precisely. Some formalisms help communication, clarity, or precision, and some don't. Some achieve precision at the cost of clarity. It's the job of the spec author to find a way of ensuring that spec readers can discover the intent as easily as possible and with no risk of misunderstanding.

There are also some higher level issues such as making sure that folk see the right document for their needs.

I remember the first version of the RDF Model Theory document [1].  It's probably important that that document existed, and that it should be findable, but it shouldn't have been findable _easily_; there are probably few folk for whom this was the most sympathetic introduction to RDF.

The most entertaining of its eccentricities is that the 'modelling' in the title is not the idea that the maths models the world, but instead that the world models the maths.  This probably isn't an eccentricity from the presumed point of view of its authors: a document which refers in its first sentence to "'world'" in scare-quotes is paddling in different-coloured oceans from the rest of us.

Norman
[who is realising he has derived much innocent amusement and delight from specs, over the years, not always for the right reasons]


[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-rdf-mt-20010925/

-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK