Henry Story wrote:
The wording of this can be improved clearly. But let me start with an example. Take the document with the following sentence:
Doc 1. A. Jack has a house
You can add a sentences to Doc 1 to get Doc 2
A. Jack has a house B. Jack a du travail. C. Jack est mari�.
B and C are in French. When you understand French you understand something more than when you understand english. But they have not said anything incompatible with Doc 1. They have just added information.
B says: Jack has work and C says: Jack is married
You could have stripped Doc 2 of B and C and had still had something usable.
So the point is: whatever extensions you add to an Atom document, a parser that parses it as a pure Atom document cannot be misunderstanding the document. Ie: he is not liable to anything.
I find the english examples 1) not pertinent, 2) misleading*. I'm also inclined to avoid terms like "meaning", "misunderstanding", "understanding " - they're highly subjective and don't strike me as operationally useful. I still have no idea what 2 means.
Anyway, this won't cater for the situation where the publisher wants to insist you do not process the document without be able to process a specified namespace. Tim's proposal does.
I am sure that with a little effort we can work out how to put this in one clear crisp sentence.
Then you should do that :) But even if you did, I doubt that you will be able to constrain things in the wild to be suitably monotonic.
We are working on a standard where reaching consensus is the goal. Adding any type of limitation requires serious justification. I don't see any at all at present for the PaceExtendingAtom proposal.
I do. It's simpler than anything I've seen to date.
cheers Bill
* Atom documents are not collections of facts.
