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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: W3C XML Schema Questionaire
 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amy Lewis" <amyzing@t...> To: <xml-dev@x...> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 8:27 PM Subject: Re: W3C XML Schema Questionaire > > Is *anyone* going to answer that it's okay to have "flaws"? This is > the kind of argument that us developers use with managers, and as the > managers always answer, so I'll transform the question: A development manager who says "I promised it with the specified features and within budget by the end of the second quarter, so it will ship on June 30th or heads will roll" is essentially saying "it's OK to have flaws". He/she may deny it, but we all know that that's the reality. Likewise, if the Schema spec goes to Recommendation status before there is extensive implementation experience by *independent* developers and *proof* that the independent implementations of the spec interoperate cleanly, then the W3C is essentially saying "it's OK to have flaws ... we'll fix them later ... but we have to get the spec out now [for some reason or other]." Again, no manager (or standards body) would put it quite as bluntly as Jonathan Robie did, but this is the reality that we live in: It may be that a flawed spec *now* is better than a better spec someday. I happen to disagree with this with respect to Schema today, but we were faced with a very similar choice in DOM Level 1 two years ago: The WG *knew* that if the DOM Recommendation didn't come out before IE5 (and, we thought at the time, Netscape 5), that it would have missed its window of opportunity to be relevant. A "flawed" standard (we probably used euphemisms such as "slighly buggy" or "not completely stable") was considered to be better than no standard. In retrospect, I think we did the right thing. Similarly, the Schema WG may pat themselves on the back a couple years from now because they got the thing out the door, warts and all ... or they may curse their stupidity for not taking time to do it right, which <dream> left the field open for the ISO's dramatic re-establishment of its credibility in the markup language space back in 2001 with the simple yet powerful Relax standard </dream>. It's not *obvious* that a great schema spec in two years is better for us as developers, XML advocates, and businesspeople than a "flawed" schema spec this year. Jonathan's just asking us to privately weigh this and let the Schema WG know our decision. FWIW, I would tell the Schema WG the same thing I'd tell a development manager who needs a product released on an unreasonable schedule: it's far better to sacrifice features than quality. Strip the feature set down so that it meets everyone's fundamental need for DTD functionality in XML syntax with reasonable data types, get the "Level 1" spec out as soon as that's proven stable, then add all the other neat stuff in Level 2, 3, .... *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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