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Re: Realistic proposals to the W3C?

• From: Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@w...>
• To: Matt Sergeant <matt@s...>
• Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:16:42 +0200

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 08:33:23PM +0100, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Clark C. Evans wrote:
> 
> > > CLARITY OF SPECS
> > > 
> > > Insist on an open source reference implementation?
> > 
> > Absolutely.  Only, call me strange, but I would go 
> > one step further and say that the reference 
> > implementation *is* the recommendation and that 
> > any other explanatory documents are secondary.  
> 
> No! Please god no.

  yes I second that. sorry but all attempts at simply building "reference 
code" was just an exercize in insanity ! I would not make the software
normative ...

> We'd end up with every spec coming out in Java. And those of us who don't
> work in Java would have a very hard time converting the code to something
> we can actually use.

 s/And those of us who don't work in Java//  :-)
  
> I'm actually not too hot on a reference implementation, simply because you
> can only do it in one language, and thats unlikely to be my language of
> choice (of course I wouldn't complain if there was a ref.impl shipped with
> a REC). What I'd rather see is some of the trickier concepts in some of
> the specs converted to psuedo code. XSLT's template conflict resolution
> might be a good example. Took me a while to grok what it was getting at,
> and psuedo code in some places can really help.

  Having implementations ready and checking that they behave well is
very important, having ones with source available is a definite plus
and real free software nirvana ! But turning those into the spec is
IMHO the worse thing to do, nearly all code have bugs, would the bugs
be the specs ? Try to estimate the number of revision of XML-1.0 from
that time to now if we had to fix all bugs one by one in a reference
implementation used as the specification !

Daniel

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    • From: "Clark C. Evans" <cce@c...>
  • Re: Realistic proposals to the W3C?
    • From: Matt Sergeant <matt@s...>

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