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RE: XML Schema Test Collection open for contributions

• From: Mike.Champion@S...
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 04 May 2001 14:33:10 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David E. Cleary [mailto:davec@p...]
> Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 9:25 AM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> 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.

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