At 02:07 PM 10/2/00 +0200, Lloyd Rutledge wrote:
Having W3C require implementors of one standard be required to
implement several others from day one, if that correctly paraphrases
you, Simon, may have its merits -- and with the luxury of not being an
implementor myself, I'm inclined to see these merits. However,
(speaking as advocate-in-proxy) implementors are typically very hard
pressed to implement even the one standard for the first release,
especially is that release date is targeted to coincide with the
release of the format itself. This is complicated further if the
related standard itself is not yet released as a recommendation, as is
the case with XPointer. If every potentially related standard had to
also be implemented, it would be a long time before we see SMIL 2.0,
and other formats, first emerge in any practical sense. It may be
wise to slow release cycles as part of deliberate full step-by-step
inter-format integration, but it would put a hard-to-ignore strain on
implementors.
I agree that it puts strain on implementors, but I think it points to an
architectural implementation change that XML is driving: moving toward
reusable code at various levels of a program.
At some point I'd like to dream that this will be an integration problem
rather than a development problem, but right now I can see where that's not
too promising. Getting generic modules out into the world and used is
pretty difficult, it seems.
Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books