Re: new iafa draft

[Thomas Krichel <[e-mail]>]

  On iafa@bunyip, Jon writes about his reissue of the IAFA draft:

> Keep all the comments coming in folks...

  I am writing only now since I was away over Xmas. I had a look
  at the draft tonight. There does not appear to be much change
  to the previous version. In particular, I can not find any 
  passage that addresses the critical thoughts that I communicated
  to this list under a threat "IAFA templates: a user's comment" that
  run here on 21 March 1995. In particular, I claimed that the
  templates are based on the assumption that each version is contained
  in one file, which is wrong in many practical instances when  
  encoding documents. I requested a "part" syntax. Jon then suggested
  to use the order of templates to emulate a "part" syntax. However 
  the current draft still says that that the field order does not matter. 
  Until this issue is cleared up I can see little future for the
  use of the templates. 

  In the meantime, paf wrote, in a private message:

> Now to another thing which we have deleted from the IAFA
> paper, and that is the '-v0' etc endings of the attribute
> names. Instead we are using ordering among the attributes.

  Since I collect the templates to use the whois++ protocol
  to transport my database, I am more interested in being whois++
  compliant, since that is what the software requires. However
  I have not a set of rules about how to write template-files.
  If I had those I could have a stab at my own draft "on encoding
  documents \`a la whois++". The practical experience we have 
  already gained with the WoPEc project (http://netec.wustl.edu/WoPEc.html)
  should help. However I need at least one coworker. Any takers?
  
  P.S. I am copying this message to [e-mail],
  if that is not an appropriate list please feel free to tell me
  off :-)

  Happy New Year!



  Thomas Krichel                               mailto:[e-mail]
                                  http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Economics/tkrichel