Subject: Re: cardinal q-factors

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 10:24:51 +0100

At 18:55 14/10/98 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
[...]
>So I would have preferred that the warning say "...are likely to
>produce unpredictable results unless they have been defined in
>advance by a registration."

My view is that q-factors are applied not so much to specific feature
constraints, but to composite feature set descriptions.  There may be
special cases in which they can be seen as applying to specific features,
but they would (I believe) be exactly that: special cases.  (They may be
important special cases, worthy of special treatment.)

As far as work on the documents is concerned, I propose to use language
that does not prohibit cardinal q-value semantics, but at least cautions
against careless use of such.  That way, we can move ahead with the work in
hand, and return to this debate at a later time.

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: Al Gilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 09:12:03 -0400 (EDT)

to follow up on what Graham Klyne said:

> As far as work on the documents is concerned, I propose to use
> language that does not prohibit cardinal q-value semantics, but
> at least cautions against careless use of such.  That way, we
> can move ahead with the work in hand, and return to this debate
> at a later time.

I fully suport this approach.

Al