Re: W3C Specification of fn:filter() -- is this a bug

> On 12 Sep 2019, at 00:04, Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2019-09-11 at 22:03 +0000, Dimitre Novatchev
> dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Why on
>> earth did they provide **this** implementation and not something
>> better
>
> Two plausible reasons - the person who wrote it did so before some of
> the other XPath 3 features had settled down or been agreed upon, or,
> they simply didnt attach much importance to it.

Sadly, I am unable to research an answer to historical questions, because I no
longer have member access to W3C's archives.

The likely reason, though, will be a negative: the spec is the way it is
because no-one (either within or outwith the WG) saw a problem with it.

In my years of doing standards work I was always impressed by the quality of
scrutiny that proposals were subjected to. It's far higher than the level I
have ever experienced with internal product specifications in any company I
have worked for. Sometimes, indeed, it could be frustrating that we spent
entire meetings discussing arcane edge cases. The quest for perfection results
in incredibly slow progress getting specs completed. But the process is not
perfect, and the resulting specifications are not perfect either. The main
reason for that is simply resources: the longer a standards group carries on,
the harder it becomes to persuade people to commit their time to it.

Frankly, if this is the biggest problem that people can find, then we did a
remarkably good job.

Michael Kay
Saxonica