Re: Conformance value of "+xml"? (was empty, or "[symm]")

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