PR-TAP-1.1 - Some comments

[Mark Taylor]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Dear DAL,
> 
> On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 11:42:49AM +0100, Mark Taylor wrote:
> > I always thought that in VOTable (following FITS practice),
> > setting the arraysize attribute to "1" has an identical meaning
> > to omitting it, i.e. that VOTable makes no distinction between
> > a scalar and a single-element array.  However now that I look
> > I can't find that confirmed (or denied) in the VOTable specification.
> 
> Hmha -- I think the fact that TOPCAT/stilts and astropy, certainly

[I didn't realise astropy did that differently]

> among the two most widespread consumers of VOTables out there,
> disagree on that point is a strong indication that we need to clean
> this up.

... but it also means that cleaning it up would be pretty difficult
to do.  If we decree that one or the other interpretation is correct,
it means one or the other popular software item ought to change its
behaviour in a probably backwardly-incompatible way.

> Anyone in for writing an Erratum?

So, no, since I don't know what it would say.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/