WG4's handling of DR-09-0248 - General: Removing the need for qualifiers on attributes in Strict

[Jirka Kosek]

Rex Jaeschke wrote:

> 1. In 25 years of working on 9 standards, my experience has been that most
> non-trivial changes/additions made at the last minute turn out to range in
> quality from problematic to disastrous.

This change is in principle very trivial, it "just" affect too many code
listings shown in examples.

> 2. A week ago in Copenhagen, we pushed back hard on this specific proposal.
>>From the minutes: 
> 
> "There was broad support for adopting the proposed solution. After some
> discussion, it was agreed that the solution involved changes to narrative,
> examples and schemas covering at least 800 pages spread through Parts 1 and
> 4. And qualified versions of some examples from Part 1 will need to be added
> to Part 4. The Project Editor estimated that the effort needed to implement
> this solution was on the order of that for all the other DR resolutions
> combined. Given the time available before the planned start of the ballots,
> members saw no way that such a big editing task and WG4 review can be
> accomplished. As such, resolution of this DR will be considered after the
> closure of the COR1 and AMD1 sets."
> 
> I remain unconvinced that the task has gotten any simpler since then.

If you assume that AMD1 should literally contain all changes made in
code listings in *informative* examples, then I agree that amount of
editorial work is so large that it is unreasonable to do it in AMD1. But
I'm not convinced that amendment should literally contain changes in
those code listing, especially because of the sheer volume of changes.

> 6. Finally, we have some non-trivial implementations out there living just
> fine with this "wart". Does it really need "fixing"? It's mighty tempting
> during standards making to "just do it right" and clean up certain
> unpleasant artifacts. However, to a very large extent, we are consolidating
> prior art here, we're not crafting a new spec from scratch. 

This is true for Transitional. But as namespace for Strict was changed
and compatibility with existing applications was already broken it is
chance to do little bit more cleanup.

If we want to have cleaner Strict and use unqualified attributes then we
should make this change now or never. Postponing the change to a next
set of CORs/AMDs would mean that Strict is not stable but radically
changing beastie -- something what people are not expecting from IS and
our WG.

It would be interesting to know what others think about this issue and
sufficiency of editing instructions I have proposed.

			Jirka


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jirka Kosek      e-mail: jirka at kosek.cz      http://xmlguru.cz
------------------------------------------------------------------
       Professional XML consulting and training services
  DocBook customization, custom XSLT/XSL-FO document processing
------------------------------------------------------------------
 OASIS DocBook TC member, W3C Invited Expert, ISO JTC1/SC34 member
------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 258 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.vse.cz/pipermail/sc34wg4/attachments/20090703/da824cb9/attachment.pgp>