"Clean Specs"

[Tim Bray]

At 02:25 PM 2/7/99 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>I think you missed a key point I made in the above paragraph - that the
>inclusion of implementors _without_ prior experience in the material being
>worked on is important.  

Actually, here's another piece of evidence that supports your position.
Recently, in an effort to refresh my memory as to why something in XML 1.0
was the way it was, I went back and reviewed a whole bunch of the 
XML SIG mailing list correspondence from back in '97 while the important
issues were being thrashed out.  Things such as white-space handling
and public identifiers and so on were being debated passionately by
people who were obviously deeply erudite as to the pros and cons of the
issues; in the thousands and thousands of emails, though, there is
almost no input as to the structure and presentation of the XML spec -
everyone was too focused on the content.  I think there's *definitely*
a lesson there. -Tim

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