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Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > Umm... the formal specification is > informative? That seems backward. > Can you or anyone who cares to explain > why that is the case since informative > descriptions are typically non-binding? For a mixture of reasons theoretical and practical, I think. Formal descriptions are harder for many people to read, so they get fewer eyeballs. The informative RDF Schema description in the Infoset was (IIRC) only reviewed by two people within the WG other than myself (who wrote it), whereas the normative prose was reviewed by a great many people. Furthermore, the formalism is rarely able to do it all; there tends to be some normative prose somewhere, unless the formalism is Turing-complete like the van Wijngaarden grammar used in the Algol 68 Revised Report. > When doing a validation, I need to use > the ROA that is binding. Perhaps it > is a legal tangle where in one process > for applying the record (reading an ROA > to determine rules for the implementation) > the prose is binding, Yes. > but in another process, > (determining if a transaction content > conforms), the informative description > becomes normative for the transaction. Not really. If the formal description disagrees with the prose, it must be changed to agree with the prose. -- There is / one art || John Cowan <jcowan@r...> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein
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