VOTable session @ Interop.Moscow

[Mark Taylor]

Alberto,

I agree with most of your comments,

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Alberto Micol wrote:

> But I think we should think of the usage of such a VOTable;
> the main aspect is not philosophical or aesthetic satisfaction,
> but a more pragmatic "how the heck will my parser understand what
> is written there"? :-)

especially that one!

About two-way references for linking STC descriptions with FIELDs:

> Why the double reference was not proposed?
> That is, to have both FIELDrefs in the group, and the refs in the  
> FIELDs?

It is a possible option, but I would argue against it.
If you are saying that references may go either one way or the other, 
then the parser has to deal with both possibilities, which is harder 
than just dealing with one.  If you are saying that they must go 
both ways, then you have to decide what to do if/when you come across 
a document in which the references in the different directions are
inconsistent with each other - check for consistency, signal an error,
make an assumption about which direction reference to believe, ...?
Errors in the document would become harder to track down (some 
parsers would process a broken document the way the author expected,
others would not).  We should not make it easy for document authors 
to write broken documents (they'll find a way even if we make it hard).

> I think that would be useful, and leave more freedom to the parser  
> implementors.

Freedom is not always a good thing!  As a parser implementor 
I'd generally rather have a well-defined job that there is only one
sensible way of doing than a number of choices about how to go
about it.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/