Re: New list of discretionary items

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

Tony, thanks for composing the update. You noted:
>The additional items don't always fit well with the idea of recasted
>the text of the Recommendations as a question that can be answered
>by 'yes' or 'no'.

I think that yes/no is too much to hope for. It would be very nice if
we could get the answers down to a range of keywords. Conceptually,
this would be like "What languages do you support for sorting?". Now
the point about passing parameters to the stylesheet probably
devolves to a set of keywords that represent the syntaxes used by
all the vendors. Presented for your consideration: the question is
"How does your processor accept external parameter settings?" and
the choices begin with these keywords: CANNOT, API_ONLY,
NAME_EQUAL_VALUE (foo=bar), DASH_P_SPACED (-p foo bar),
DASH_PARAM_SPACED (-param foo bar), and more as we encounter more
syntaxes.

There might need to be multiple questions to cover the
possibilities engendered by one discretionary item. I believe we
have 39 discretionary items so far, but it may take 60 questions
to identify the choices made by the developer on those 39 items.

>The XPointers that are being used to identify the elements in the
>Recommendations containing the descriptions of the discretionary
>behaviour don't provide enough granularity to differentiate the two
>areas in the one paragraph.

You ain't seen nothin' yet when it comes to granularity! I think we
should plan on our own added-in tagging scheme to get down into
sentence fragments. Some test cases have to test the interaction of
multiple passages in the specs (so-called "molecular tests") and
thus would need to cite more than one fragment. Since the tests
need to cover so much of the text of the W3C recommendations, the
additional work to mark discretionary and vague areas will be
minor.
.................David Marston