

RE: proposed resolution to issues #159 and #166 - encodingStyle

From: Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 13:41:47 -0800
Message-ID: <C3729BBB6099B344834634EC67DE4AE102623BEB@red-msg-01.redmond.corp.microsoft.com>
Perhaps I can add some insight into the original motivation.

The thought was that one might have a message encoded according to the
section 5 rules.  Call this rule A.  One might also have, while
consistent with the section 5 rules, applied some additional rules, such
as avoiding forward references.  Call this rule B.

It was thought useful to indicate both, so that an application which
understands only rule A could process the message correctly, while an
application that understands rules A and B could take advantage of the
extra information to process the message more efficiently.

The value of the encodingStyle attribute would be "B A".

-----Original Message-----
From: Jacek Kopecky [mailto:jacek@systinet.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 4:14 AM
To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
Subject: proposed resolution to issues #159 and #166 - encodingStyle

 Hi all. 8-)
 The ETF proposes the following resolution to the issues 159 and
166, both dealing with the type of the encodingStyle attribute
being a list of URIs identifying encoding styles in the order
from the most specific to the least specific.

 The proposal is to make the attribute be of type anyURI and
indicate a single style.

 For the discussion that resulted in this you can see [1] and the
resulting thread. The participants in the thread generally seemed
to agree that the presented resolution is the way to go,
especially since nobody was able to bring up a valid scenario for
using more than a single value of the attribute.
 The two examples brought up in the thread both were about
multiple _different_ encodings in one message which is handled by
the encodingStyle attribute scoping.
 Also, no real-world usage of multiple values in one
encodingStyle attribute was demonstrated, nor conceived by the
participants in the thread.
 If we wanted to keep the status quo, we would need to specify
what "most specific to least specific" means with respect to
encoding styles and this would unnecessarily complicate the spec.
 Best regards

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Oct/0330.html
Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2001 16:43:15 GMT
