RFC 3066bis: Philosophical objection (harsh)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

thanks for the feedback, Addison!
only one point for the moment....

--On 28. desember 2003 10:55 -0800 "Addison Phillips [wM]" 
<aphillips at webmethods.com> wrote:

>> > The description of
>> > the registry in the draft is designed to capture the meaningful
>> uses that
>> > a subtag can be put to, without limiting the subtag's use in the
>> > generative mechanism. Implementations might limit registered subtags to
>> > their informative uses.
>>
>> But if there is no whole-tag registration, what is the hard rule
>> that draws the distinction between "informative" and "non-informative"
> uses?
>> If there is a rule, we're really back with whole-tag registration.
>
> There is no rule. I wrote "might" to indicate what an implementor might
> decide to do.

that was my worry.
If one implementation decides to place one set of restrictions, either as 
generator or parser, and another implementation decides to place another 
set of restrictions, we will end up with tags that can be generated by one 
implementation and not the other, or parsed by one implementation and not 
the other. That's non-interoperability.

So if there is no rule, the only logical consequence is to implement no 
limits - because you can never trust others to implement the same limits as 
you do.

You might be able to implement *advice* - but unless the standards limit 
what you can do, you will be forced to be able to emit whatever the 
standards allow - whether you think it makes sense or not.

And that worries me.

                   Harald