VOTable and VOUnits

[Molinaro, Marco]

Hi,

I copy Markus' view on MUST/SHOULD.

I think the usage of VOUnits and its
enforcement is unclear not only in
VOTable.

Maybe we should enlarge the audience
outside Apps: Semantics at least? DAL?
Everybody?

In a sense VOUnits are enforced in no place
(happy to be proven mistaken there), at least
there's no mention in TAP apart from the
architecture diagram.

Cheers
    Marco

Il giorno ven 19 mag 2023 alle ore 09:53 Markus Demleitner <
msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> ha scritto:

> Hi Mark,
>
> On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 04:59:28PM +0100, Mark Taylor wrote:
> > Do people have opinions on which it should be?
>
> Well: Can we get away with a MUST?  By the book, I don't think we're
> allowed to do that, because it would make a large proportion of
> VOTables that were previously valid invalid in one fell swoop.
>
> On the other hand, I don't think it has any *operational*
> consequences in that things that worked before stop working (e.g., a
> new client starts refusing old VOTables), and for all I care about
> "breaking change" can only be sensibly defined operationally.  To
> make that a bit clearer, we could even hedge a bit: "for historical
> reasons, clients MUST NOT entirely reject VOTables with non-VOUnit
> compliant unit strings; it is recommended to just treat such columns
> as unitless and issue a warning".
>
> On the other hand: "issue a warning" is exactly what SHOULD is for.
> So, I'd say we ought to have SHOULD in this version and perhaps
> something like "it is planned to make this a hard requirement in
> later VOTable versions" or so.
>
>           -- Markus
>


-- 
Marco Molinaro
INAF - Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica
Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste
email marco.molinaro at inaf.it
tel. [+39] 333 33 20 564 [also Telegram]
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