[p3t] Draft documents demonstrating standards layout

[Paul Harrison]

> On 29 Aug 2024, at 18:59, Russ Allbery <eagle at eyrie.org> wrote:
> 
> My larger concern is that I am dubious that OpenAPI will prove to be
> resilient against future changes to prevailing protocols and definition
> languages any more than XML schemas were.  gRPC does not use OpenAPI, for
> example; it uses protobuf as its API definition language.  I fear that
> OpenAPI is a specification language for this one particular moment in
> time, and in the future people will use something else, similar to how XML
> schemas used to be common and now, although they still exist, they're less
> widely used.
> 
> That said, designing a specification language is an immense amount of
> work, and I don't want us to write our own either.  We should use OpenAPI
> today because that's what people use today.  But I would like to have some
> sort of semantic language specific to the IVOA, ideally one with a minimum
> amount of additional formality so that it's easy to read and easy to
> write, that nails down all the things that OpenAPI may leave ambiguous and
> provides enough additional information that we can adapt our data types to
> some new language that comes along later.
> 

Designing a general purpose specification language is a lot of work - however, all we *need* is a language to describe
interfaces that follow IVOA patterns, so that it does not have to be that extensive. So for example when the 
hypothetical IVOA interface language says for example “return error” it can be transformed into the IVOA pattern in OpenAPI that
expresses the way to return an error. So that a lot of the “detail” that makes OpenAPI complex is removed by having conventions.

Paul.

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