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> > And I'd rather have a spec written in prose than a schema any > day of the week > > . > > Having all three is best (formal spec, prose spec, and sample > instances), if they're all available. But I think I'd still > pick the formal spec if I were forced to choose just one. Ditto. You can to some extent generate a formal spec from a prose spec and vice versa, but where the formal-> prose may be lacking in higher level semantics it's less likely to be *wrong*. > There's an issue of quality, too. A prose spec written by, say, > James Clark, is often sufficient, whereas one written by, say, > Dave Winer may not be any more informative than the collection > of sample instances. I've recently being trying to deal with data that uses one of Mr. Winer's specs [1]. Wayne Steele has generated a DTD from the prose, which is linked from the spec. The DTD contains the comment: "You can add whatever other attributes on the outline element you want." > With a formal notation, you can usually count on at least _some_ > degree of precision. Exactly. Cheers, Danny. [1] http://www.opml.org/spec [2] http://static.userland.com/gems/radiodiscuss/opmlDtd.txt
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