Igor & all.,
I agree that possibility of citing IVOA standards is very important. But that also means that IVOA finally decides how to do things and will not change specification on-the-fly. That also includes removing part about "this document is only recommendation and nothing more" from the documents.
As end user (programmer) I wish standards authors collect all their brave and make standard finally a firm standard, with full resposibility to possible mistakes included in it. Then it can be published in some proceeding (of some IVOA interop?) and hence finally make it to ADS. Not having standards, but only recommendations, is in my point of view a think which distract attention of end users (programmers) to IVOA efforts.
Not to mention missing will to establish engineering body which will oversee development of libraries to work with the standards. Does IVOA really believe that they will write specs and market will decide which library (if any at all) is the best? There is not so much effort of usual write-once, use-once astronomical programmers to develop and maintain libraries. And they will not be forced to develop libraries to do the things if they have enough own problems writing and maintaining software they users requires and if they will not get paid for that work.
Petr Kubanek Received on 2008-06-22Z11:53:13