Not An April Fool’s Joke

Norm Walsh has a densely-technical post showing a nasty problem that’s cropped up in the interaction between XInclude, xml:base, and XML validation. Unless you’re a serious XML geek you probably don’t want to wade through the details, but in his conclusion, Norm raises a startling point: “I think what pains me most about this situation is that XInclude was in development for just over five years. It went through eleven drafts including three Candidate Recommendations. Why didn’t we notice this until several months after XInclude was a Recommendation? I’ll grant that XInclude is a fairly odd specification, in the sense that it’s providing functionality that you’d expect to occur down in the parser (like entities), but it’s only 8,563 words long. If we can’t get a 16 page spec right in three CRs, what hope do we have of getting the XSL/XML Query family of specifications right? By the same metric I used on XInclude, I get just over a half million words (505,779) in those documents. ” Half a million words... pretty scary.