The following are some comments about the UPDF specification
(Universal Printer Description Format, Version 0.83.1) document.
I am new to UPDF, but perhaps this is a positive thing in that it will
provide the perspective of someone coming to UPDF "cold" and
only having what's written down in the spec to go by.
* There is no table of contents and no index, making it impossible
to use this as a reference document.
* Heading levels are not numbered like they were in 0.81.3, making an
already difficult-to-follow nesting structure (see the following point)
now
impossible-to-follow. There are not even page numbers in the current
version!
* It is very difficult to discern the nesting of the XML elements. You
have to
either flip back and find the list of sub-elements in the containing
element
(in 0.81.3 you could count the numbering level in the numeric header,
which
gets very difficult as the nest level deepens). I would suggest using
heading numbers and indenting as well to make the nesting visually
obvious.
* Many elements merely list the attributes without any explanation. While
the purpose of some can be deduced from the names, this is very
imprecise in a standards document and opens it up for misunderstandings
and incompatibilities between vendors.
* "XML-DTD encoding of UPDF" section references a DTD file but the UPDF
is actually defined via XML schema (XSD) files.
Regards,
Alan Hlava
IBM Printing Systems Division
hlava@us.ibm.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Aug 12 2002 - 16:09:09 EDT