Meeting minutes
Symposium videos
Bethan: What copyright are we going to put on them?
John: Do we need permission from all the people?
Bethan: I don't know what the rules are. Do we want any kind of statement on the videos themselves?
… If it's a less of a mine field to put nothing, I'm okay with that.
Alan: I'm not sure what else has been done.
Bethan: I'd be tempted to put a restrictive copyright on them so that if you want to do anything else, you have to ask.
Norm: Who would they ask?
Bethan: The iXML symposium mailing list?
John: What did Declarative Amsterdam do?
Norm: When I asked where we should put them, the Internet Archive was suggested.
Alan: That would be good.
Alan: They also host The Prisoner.
John: A cursory glance at the Declarative Amsterdam videos doesn't reveal a copyright statement.
Norm: I'd leave it off, but if you have any ideas, send it to the list?
Some discussion of copyright and AI scrapers and the like.
Add symbol for "epsilon"?
Bethan: What's the state of play?
John: I don't know.
Norm: I'm persuaded by the arguments for "".
Some discussion of how many empty strings can fit in a string.
Norm repeats his remarks about whitespace inside () or not.
Bethan: I've come around to the idea of "" *and* some kind of epsilon symbol that is not a string.
Alan: The emails are wearing you down!
Norm: If you have something that's easy to type on a US ASCII keyboard, does that mean the other symbol doesn't have to be easy to type?
Bethan: Relistening to some of the videos, Elisa and her students were talking about how to match "." (in the regular expression sense).
… I think ~[] is one of the most hostile bits of design I've ever encountered.
… I think matching "." is something that people want to do and we should have something that's more approachable and user friendly.
… If we're going to make a change for epsilon that's backwards incompatible, we should give ourselves the freedom to review other syntactic choices.
… Can we make the language easier to use?
John: We'd still be keeping the complement of a character set.
Bethan: Yes, but not the empty one!
John: The backwards incompatibilities are new symbols for epsilon and any character.
… The backwards incompatibility would be that they wouldn't work on an older implementation.
Bethan: We'd also be forbidding an empty alt..
Bethan: I think if () creates an alt, the alt should still contain the empty string, it shouldn't be literally empty in the XML representation.
Some discussion of the semantic distinctions between "nothing" and "the empty string'.
Norm: We should encourage people to think about the grammar in ways that are correct about how grammars work!
Bethan: I think we should also talk about what it means when the input is not recognized by the grammar.
… I've been persuaded that that should be an error.
Some discussion of the distinction between "old parsers don't recognize new grammars" and "new parsers don't recognize old grammars"
Alan: We could put a version in there so that new processors could understand the old grammar.
Some discussion of version numbers vis-a-vis modularity and pragmas and such.
Next meeting
15 September?
Alan gives regrets.
Some discussion of when XML Summer School occurs.
We'll move to 29 September if we have too many regrets for 15 September.