Declare external vocabularies

[peterdesmet]

Documenting email discussion with @tucotuco.

@tucotuco:

Do you think there is a place for being able to declare an external vocabulary as an allowed set?

[peterdesmet]

Yeah, it's something we have been thinking about and should probably document as a feature request (GitHub issue). The two disadvantages I see are:

• You'd need to have some agreement on the format of such a controlled vocab for it to work, but that seems doable.
• It breaks the self-contained-ness of a specification file: the specification file itself no longer contains all the info to document itself. Also, any changes to the controlled vocab won't be part of the version history of the file. 😕

[peterdesmet]

@tucotuco:

Hmmm. What if there was a step to grab the vocabs to local files and make them part of the specification. Not fully self-contained still, but a step closer?

[peterdesmet]

Yes, but rather than separate local files, I would write these to the spec file itself, as lists. That would keep the specs contained to a single file, with versioning.

Also, this retrieving and local writing seems to be part of implementation, not specification. Still, it would be nice to indicate the url of the external vocab in the specs. The simplest solution is to indicate this as a comment after the list, but that might only be human-readable. I don't have any ideas on how to indicate it otherwise...

[tucotuco]

I agree that the specification of the external vocab in the specs is a good thing. It means that, as an implementation, one could take a WHIP file that has the external link and no vocabs, run it through a "flesher" and get the vocabs inserted in the resulting new WHIP file, which could then be edited to remove and vocab values you did not want in there.

[peterdesmet]

Tempting... ☺️ How would such a syntax look like?