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LC comments draft-hollenbeck-ietf-xml-guidelines-06.txt

2002-09-23 14:39:40
Dear all,

Please find below my LC comments.

Jean-Jacques Moreau.

------------------
draft-holl.nbeck-ietf-xml-guidelines-06.txt
LC Comments

Overall, a job well done! Specific comments below.

Section 1.2 (Scope)

"the exclusive use of XML as the data representation"
   Shouldn't this say that XML can be used to represent
   both data AND protocol elements?

Section 3 (XML Alternatives)

"; mechanims such as XML merely add bloat"
   Insert: "for these protocols, "
   between: ";" and: "mechanisms".

"RFC 3252... bloat"
   I am still of the opinion that the sentence should be
   deleted.

"which are not visible"
   Replace by: "which are not human readable".

Section 4.4 (XML Declarations)

"Note that XML Declaration is not part of the XML document's
Information Set"
   I thought it was an infoset property on the document/root
   element?

Section 4.6 (Comments)

   The following questions comes to mind: what about
   forwarding? I.e. what if the receiver is an intermediary
   (that also does some processing on the message):
   should it forward comments? can it ignore them when
   forwarding?

   The same question also applies to Processing Instructions
   (section 4.5).

Section 4.7 (Validity and Extensibility)

"XML based protocol specification should thus
explicitely describe extension mechanisms and
requirements to recognize or ignore extensions."

   I suggest adding: "Some protocols define such
   a mechanism, e.g. SOAP's mustUnderstand attribute."

Section 4.8.1 (Namespace and attributes)

"<ns1:fox a="xxx" ns1:b="qqq"
   xmlns="http://example.org"/>
  <fox a="xxx" ns1:b="qqq"
   xmlns="http://example.org"; xmlns:ns1="http://example.org"/>"

   Didn't you mean to have only one of the above two examples?
   Otherwise, the reader is not sure which "a" you are
   referring to in the next paragraph.

   Also, the first example misses the "xmlns:n1" declaration;
   and the second example misses "ns1" before "fox".

"bound to namespaces which are identical"
   To make things really clear, I suggest adding:
   "For example, the following two examples are
    discouraged:
     <ns1:fox a="xxx" a="yyy"
       xmlns="http://example.org";
       xmlns:ns1="http://example.org"/>
     <ns1:fox ns1:a="xxx" ns2:a="yyy"
       xmlns="http://example.org";
       xmlns:ns1="http://example.org";
       xmlns:ns2="http://example.org"/>"

"XSLT language: while attributes" and later "they are prefixed"
   The transatition would read better with: "XSLT
   language: attributes..." and "but they are prefixed".
   Otherwise, one thinks "while" applies to "language".

Section 4.9 (Element and attribute design considerations)

"or digital signature)."
   Add: "It also implies additional overhead to fetch and
   apply the corresponding schema."

Section 4.10 (Binary data and text)

"is best for large quantities of data."
   Add: "This does not necessarily mean that entire schema
   processing needs to be performed, simply that typing via
   base64 must be supported." I think this is an important
   consideration.

Section 4.11 (Incremental processing)

"browsers which incrementatlly render HTML pages"
   Also add a reference to Jabber, which IMO is
   precisely an example of interspersed multiple
   interactions.

Section 4.16 (Interaction with IANA)

"application/xml"
   Why not also "application/xml+protocol_name", which would
   clearly indicate this is protocol data, to be handled
   as such, but could as well be rendered in a browser?

Overall comment
   It is difficult to find recommendations
   at first glance. One has to read the whole text and
   carefully annotate them. Maybe some special markup,
   or the use of capital "MAY", "MUST", etc. could be
   used to clearly differentiate recommendations from
   the surrounding text? Given the targetted readership
   (protocol designers) and proposed status of this
   recommendation (BCP), I would consider this as a
   significant comment.




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