On Thursday 21 August 2008 14:29:54 Ovid wrote: > Remember, all of this is OPTIONAL. If you don't want it, don't use it.
I'm not sure that line of thinking works well for standards, OOXML notwithstanding. Acme::Calendar::Mayan might want to define a vigesimal type to encode time intervals; why not chuck a canonical representation of alternate base systems in the OPTIONAL section of the spec as well while we're talking about it? I've written a handful of TAP producers and consumers myself, as well as software which other people have used in ways I never intended. The more complexity you add to a system to reduce the complexity people have to manage to use your system as you never intended, the more complexity everyone has to manage to use your system as you always intended. I can deal with a "simple list of key/value pairs", but the "mostly" and "for the most part" bother me. -- c
