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From: D.M. Procida on 26 May 2010 14:45 Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: > D.M. Procida <real-not-anti-spam-address(a)apple-juice.co.uk> wrote: > > It's not human nature to be good at assimilating the content of > > exhaustive technical documents. > > All such claims about `human nature' are cobblers, and you know it. As far as we can tell, it's in human nature to be good at foraging and living in small bands of around 150 individuals. And chess, for some reason. Daniele
From: Richard Tobin on 26 May 2010 15:15 In article <1jj451d.1vhjoy1szjwgvN%real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid>, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: >And, for that matter, what about my various other points that you chosen >to ignore without comment and without even mentioning that you were >rudely ignoring them? I only respond to the particular points where I have something I want to say. It doesn't mean I dismiss (or agree with) the other ones. -- Richard
From: Peter Ceresole on 26 May 2010 15:24 Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: > That is, specs are useless if they are not useful. > > Surely even you must admit that, Peter? Specs cannot be useful unless > they are accessible - which includes: readable. They are useful; as specs. To specialists, who can understand them and use them to keep their designs compliant. They don't need to be accessible except to designers- specialist engineers. They are not intended for the general public, who don't need them in any way. If you decide that you want to get involved with specs (why would you?) then it is up to you to acquire the expertise to understand them. -- Peter
From: Richard Tobin on 26 May 2010 15:35 In article <1jj451d.1vhjoy1szjwgvN%real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid>, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: >They go about the job in a fashion intended to be hard to understand - No, not at all. >they follow the standard process, you see, and it's meant to be a >barrier to comprehension. I have never seen any sign of this being true. >It's also meant to be quick and easy to produce. Well, it certainly doesn't succeed. It often takes years to produce a fairly short standard. >No thought is given to >the read side of it - these documents are written for the convenience of >the author(s). I don't really understand that. In what way is it convenient to the authors? Why would they do it at all, if not to produce a standard that others can implement? I agree that it might be to the advantage of some of the companies employing the authors to produce incomprehensible standards, but I have never felt that the authors themselves were following such a policy. On the other hand, I do think that there is a process rather like that at work. Large companies can throw hundreds of man-years at implementing a standard, while small companies can't. So complicated standards work to their advantage. I don't believe their standards committee members in general deliberately make standards complicated, but they end up supporting changes that make them so. But that is about the technical content, not the writing. >> Paying >> "proper writers" as well is generally out of the question, >Quite irrelevant - the very best technical authors are those who are not >employed as such. The very best are engineers with a bent for writing, >who are also interested in communicating their ideas. I generally agree. But how much of such people's time are companies going to allow to be spent on the unexciting business of standardisation? And how many of them are going to want to spend their time in such a bureaucracy-ridden field? >> and of >> course would still require the technical experts to check every >> sentence. >Every sentence is subjected to minute scrutiny by a lot of people in the >case of all RFCs. > >So that objection is null. And yet errors are always turning up in standards that you'd think could not possibly be missed! More importantly, you have to get a document into reasonable shape before asking for public review. You can only carefully read a document so many times. If you put out too many drafts, the people who would notice errors give up reading them. >They're written using a style that is deliberately obfuscated Again, I think this is completely wrong. They may be hard to understand, but it is certainly not deliberate. By the way, the W3C's standard-for-producing-standards is at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/ -- Richard
From: Richard Tobin on 26 May 2010 15:37
In article <1jj46mp.7czn451ojo427N%real-not-anti-spam-address(a)apple-juice.co.uk>, D.M. Procida <real-not-anti-spam-address(a)apple-juice.co.uk> wrote: >small bands of around 150 individuals. How do those differ from large bands of 150 individuals? -- Richard |