OASIS Open

Individual

No

As many of you know, I have really wrestled with CAP over the last 6 months or so. While my thoughts are far from the element vs. attribute wars often seen in standard efforts, I do have concerns about CAP 1.0, which prevent me from voting Yes on moving it forward. Specifically, I think we “stood silent” on too many things. While “silent” has been interpreted as having no opinion by some in the group, having no opinion, when it comes to standards, means that implementers will make the decision for us. Doing so, I fear, will either a) limit the adoption to only those who care to take the risk (or don’t care as the case may be), and/or b) fork the standard.

I could digress into providing a list of supporting issues I have with the actual spec document itself, such has having normative language that is not supported/enforced by the XML Schema Definition (XSD), or vagueness on how things are suppose to be implemented, but given previous attempts I feel this is a fruitless effort at this point. And while I think TCs can some times go overboard to achieve perfection in their work, I feel we have simply avoided or ignored some fundamental items, so “perfection” is not what I am talking about at all. I may send a note to the list in the near future, but consider that outside of responding to this ballot. I do, however, think all of my concerns lead up to a single fact, which is where I will put to rest my issue as it pertains to voting on this ballot.

I believe, based on a thorough review of the CAP 1.0 specification as updated after our Public Review and representing a commercial implementer/vendor, that if we handed this to 2 different developers who had no participation in the TC and asked them create implementations, that these implementations would NOT be able to automatically and successfully interoperate, which is the very purpose of our TC. I do not even think new efforts within the group, without many behind the scenes discussions, would interoperate. I am sure there would be some levels of element support, however, this is different than interoperating. Agreeing on letters and words are one thing, but grammar (i.e., structure) and how languages are spoken (i.e. data is exchanged) is a completely different thing we chose to ignore or even formally provide guidance and reference.