DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: XML catalog resolution problems

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

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/ Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com> was heard to say:
| On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 09:28:44AM -0600, Paul Grosso wrote:
|> You are correct, xsltproc is not in compliance with the XML Catalog spec.
[...]
|   And I have said to the XML Catalog comitee that an URI Reference is
| an URI-Reference and that having to distinguish arbitrarilly one done
| from a DOCTYPE entry from one done from an xi:include href entry 
| doesn't make any sense to me, and that I would not support the distinction
| in my software unless getting a meaningful reason to distinguish
| those.

You are, of course, free to do anything you please. Committees of like-minded
individuals gather together to produce specifications for many reasons:

- - To allow greater interoperability between products and applications
- - To increase market share by allowing products to compete on implementation
- - To reduce the number of things that end-users have to know, increasing ease-of-use

To name but a few.

In the course of producing specifications, different points of view
are presented, both within the committee and from the community at
large. Some of those points of view are in conflict. Through
discussion, debate, and persistence, effective committees eventually
reach a consensus position. Often, that position varies from the
position that different members of the committee (and the community at
large) consider ideal but the benefit of the specification as a whole
is seen as more important.

In this particular case, the Entity Resolution TC discussed your
objections at length. Eventually we reached the consensus opinion that
system identifiers and URIs are not the same thing and that the
distinction in the spec was valuable.

I've served on lots of committees, I've argued lots of positions.
Sometimes I've argued persuasively and seen issues resolved in ways
that are consistent with my point of view. Sometimes I've argued less
persuasively (or at least less successfully) and seen issues resolved
in ways that are inconsistent with my point of view. C'est la vie.

The whole process is a pointless waste of time if, at the end of the
day, individuals or companies are going to produce implementations
that match their own points of view rather than the consensus view of
the published specifications.

I am, to be frank, disappointed and frustrated that you've blown a
great big hole in a smooth operation of XML Catalogs. The whole point
was interoperability and you've $%#$@#ed that up.

I think your action threatens the whole enterprise and it's deplorable.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | More men become good through
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | practice than through
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | nature.--Democritus of Abdera
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