Tablecast: Notes

This document is for rough notes on pending changes and the reasons behind design decisions in Tablecast.

Draft 0.1

Motivations for switching from an element-based design to an attribute-based design:

• (a) implementations only have to search the entry for one element, not multiple elements;
• (b) easier to express that the attributes are all mandatory (can be validated with XSD);
• (c) can exist outside of Atom.

Pending work item: Mention that although some JSON processors only support limited ranges of numbers (e.g. JavaScript only supports a 53-bit mantissa), the JSON syntax supports numbers of arbitrary size and Tablecast processors are expected to be fully compliant.

Pending work item: Use namespaced attributes, like "tc:effective" instead of "effective", so they can be attached to arbitrary other XML elements within XML-based content formats.