RE: [oasis-member-discuss] RE: RDDL use in ASIS

[Christopher B Ferris <chrisfer@us.ibm.com>]

Hal,

Please see my CIL below.

Cheers,

Christopher Ferris
STSM, Software Group Standards Strategy
email: chrisfer@us.ibm.com
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=440
phone: +1 508 377 9295

"Hal Lockhart" <hlockhar@bea.com>
wrote on 03/03/2006 10:08:48 AM:

> Thought it was obvious.
>  
> 1. We never documented why we dropped RDDL. It
was not because we 
> didn’t like the concept of RDDL.

That wasn't the impression I got, but I am glad to
hear that.

> 2. Because RDDL consists of a bunch of different
documents scattered
> around on various web sites with no clear home, it could disappear
tomorrow.

So what? There are two (or more) versions of lots
of specs/standards out there.
RSS0.9, RSS1.0, RSS2.0 (which actually predates 1.0),
Atom... That does not 
seem to have had a detrimental effect on the adoption
of syndication feeds
as a general concept, and in many cases, there are
tools that can effectively
consume and produce multiple versions (e.g. SharpReader,
RSSBandit, etc. etc.)

Only one of these technologies has any standards status
(Atom) and that is a
relatively recent development. There were plenty of
tools that implemented
v0.3 well before the IETF ratified 1.0 as an standards
track RFC.

> 3. It is not only unclear what version of RDDL
to cite, it is 
> unclear even what version represents the best and latest. The tree
> appears to have forked.

All of the versions have merit, IMO. None, to my knowledge,
require any
tooling upgrades to support. Why should it matter,
then, which is chosen?
Pick the one you like the best. Pick the one that
others have used.
Flip a coin. Whatever. 

However, IMO, you threw the baby out with the bath-water
in this case and provided no rationale as to why you
did so.

Did anyone contact Jonathan Borden or Tim Bray and
ask them? Did
anyone notice that the specs/schema published at schemas.xmlsoap.org
now use RDDL and ask Microsoft which version they
used (although it
is obvious by doing a "view as source")?

There was active discussion on the WS-RX TC about
adopting RDDL
for its "namespace documents", you might
have asked the TC
administrator what they were doing. I know for a fact
that at least 
a couple of members of the TAB are also members of
WS-RX TC.

> 4. Although every version is labeled as a non-final
draft, no work 
> has been done for two years. This suggests that the spec is an 
> orphan and not something OASIS should cite either normatively or as
> a best practice.

No work has been done on the RSS0.9 spec for years
and years either.
I don't see how that makes it any less valuable.

Just because something is a standard-with-a-capital-S,
doesn't make
it good. Just because something isn't, doesn't make
it worthless.

In the context of the use for which we have for the
metadata, 
IMO, any of the versions would satisfy OASIS's requirements.

>  
> Hal
>  
> 
> From: Christopher B Ferris [mailto:chrisfer@us.ibm.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 9:25 PM
> To: Hal Lockhart
> Cc: James Bryce Clark; Norman Walsh; oasis-member-discuss@lists.
> oasis-open.org; William Cox
> Subject: [oasis-member-discuss] RE: RDDL use in ASIS
>  
> 
> And the point being? 
> 
> Christopher Ferris
> STSM, Software Group Standards Strategy
> email: chrisfer@us.ibm.com
> blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=440
> phone: +1 508 377 9295 
> 
> "Hal Lockhart" <hlockhar@bea.com> wrote on 03/02/2006
05:12:51 PM:
> 
> > > | What do others think? As I said, there was a lot of pushback
on
> > RDDL.
> > > 
> > > I don't recall reading the pushback on RDDL, but "and
preference to
> > > have an index.html or one of the other default HTML pages"
isn't
> > > related. RDDL is a mechanism for placing metadata in HTML.
> > 
> > 
> > Ok, for the record, last summer Bill and I tried to figure out
the
> > standards pedigree of RDDL so we could cite it.
> > 
> > No sign of it at W3C, not even published as a Note.
> > 
> > At www.rddl.org, there is a spec dated Feb 18, 2002, no version
> > specified. I guess this is version 1.
> > 
> > At http://www.openhealth.org/RDDL/20040118/rddl-20040118.html
there is a
> > spec dated Jan 18, 2004 marked as version 2.0. It describes itself
as "a
> > draft". 
> > 
> > At http://www.tbray.org/tag/rddl/rddl3.html there is a document
dated
> > June 1, 2003, with no version. Not sure what version this is.
Perhaps
> > Tim's private version? If it is RDDL 3, it is older than RDDL
2.0.
> > 
> > All of these contain the sentence "This document has no
official
> > standing and has not been considered nor approved by any organization."
> > 
> > There are also a number of articles, implementations and even
a
> > Wikipedia article (which points to the 2002 version). The 2004
version
> > says "While this document has no official standing, it is
the intention
> > of the TAG to seek guidance from the W3C membership and the larger
> > community on the question of whether and how to progress this
document
> > and the use of RDDL." As far as I can see there has been
no work done on
> > RDDL in 2 years.
> > 
> > Will the real RDDL please stand up? If this is as great stuff
as you all
> > say it is, can't somebody put in enough time to push it thru
an OASIS TC
> > or publish it as a TAG Finding? If I put a normative reference
to
> > something with a pedigree like this in an OASIS Committee Spec
and
> > submitted it for member approval, I would end up with a bunch
of arrows
> > sticking out of me.
> > 
> > Hal
> > _______________________________________________________________________
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