Modularity of specs

On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 16:57, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> Clearly, seven spaces is not a legal QName in XSLT. I'm not sure if this
> language has been carefully inserted into every location in the XSLT
> spec., but it's obviously the intent.

And that's the good practice to write modular specs IMO.

I am getting more and more concerned [1] by the issues caused by the
lack of modularity of specs which are using a copy/past from other specs
or from the state of the art at the time they've been written!
 
It's probably still more difficult than when you're writing a program,
but specs should present external interfaces (QName definition could be
one of them) to be used by reference by other specs, avoid refences to
specific versions of other specs and never use copy/paste :-)

Eric
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Oct/0282.html
-- 
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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