Tin Man Design Question 7 - to vote Jan. 9th?

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

Here is one of the issues identified in my message titled
"Test Case Markup & Cataloging, Tin Man edition" that I sent
to this list on 12/1/2000:
7. Shall we define every choice for every discretionary item
   separately in the DTD or pool the choices?

DISCUSSION:
This is not about naming the choices, which I expect that the
subcommittee on discretionary items will do, guided by the
whole committee's votes on these 11 questions. In the Tin Man
proposal, it says
<!ATTLIST DiscretionaryItem Behavior ( True | False
  | RaiseError | ChooseLast |  PassThrough | Ignore | AddSpace
  | ReturnEmpty | ChooseDefault | UsePublic | UseSystem
  | UseGiven | FIFO | LIFO | Interleave ) #REQUIRED >
which was a rough attempt to show that even with ~50 items,
the set of keywords describing the choice is small. We can
use the power of the DTD to force the exact set of choices for
each item, or we can just present the above list once and make
per-item requirements at the semantic level. BTW, choosing the
former makes it more likely that the discretionary items must
be enumerated in a prescribed order, but it should be a very
rare event when more than one applies to one test case.

The only people writing catalog data should be seasoned XSLT
professionals, but they may find this work burdensome and rush
though it. This question will tend to reveal how prescriptive
the committee is likely to be.

I would like to see us take a formal vote on this "lump or
separate" question, since it reveals grander sentiments.
.................David Marston