Re: An interoperability problem?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Lauren Wood <lauren@softquad.com> was heard to say:
| On 15 May 2001, Norman Walsh wrote:
| 
| > But there's nothing we can say. We can't say put the PI first and if
| > the PI isn't first, there's the potential for non-interoperable
| > interpretations by perfectly reasonable processors.
| 
| Why can't we say " if the PI isn't first, there's the potential for non-
| interoperable interpretations by processors."? Seems like a good 
| warning of a potential gotcha to have in the spec.

We can say that, but it bothers me. We can have Jane Doe working on
one system, with everything working fine; she sends her files to John
Smith and they don't work at all. Both systems are working "correctly"
so it'll be an interoperability problem caused by the catalog. Yuck.
(Yeah, I know that at some level it's a problem caused by the user,
but that's not what the user is likely to feel.)

Anyway, the PI is a new feature that we've added and after considering
the ramifications of implementing it and trying to imagine how it'll
get used, I'm concerned.

If you need to send a catalog (and maybe other stuff) with a document,
then you need to send a package. And for that, you need a packaging
spec. This PI (and to some extent, automatically loading a catalog if
it happens to have the right name and be in the right place) offers a
workaround for a small subset of the packaging cases.

On the one hand, there's some user convenience in doing this. On the
other, (this morning) I find it more aesthetically pleasing to simply
face the issue, note that the world *needs a packaging system* just about
as badly as it needs a decent resolver system, and eschew workarounds
for it in our catalog spec.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | Many ideas grow better when transplanted to
XML Standards Engineer | another mind than in the one where they sprang
Technology Dev. Group  | up.--Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sun Microsystems, Inc. |