[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Why informal specs usually win
Paul Prescod writes: > That is not true. There were many bugs found in XML months after it > was available on a public mailing list. Characterizing bugs in > specifications is much, much harder than characterizing them in > code. It wouldn't be so hard if the specs were more formal, but > that isn't the way things are going. Informal specs fit into the Worse-is-Better pattern [1]: a less formal spec that many people can understand easily will generally be adopted and implemented much more successfully than a more formal spec that fewer people can understand, despite the disadvantage that the less formal spec probably contains ambiguities, inconsistencies and omissions. Paul and I are among the five or six (I exaggerate -- 10 or 20) people who ever bothered to figure out SGML groves, from one of the more obfuscated formal specs, so we're not a good sample. All the best, David [1] http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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