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Howard,

Nobody is "required" to be SBML compliant. You only have to implement
this if you want to, and you can advertise to the world that your
software reads and writes SBML. You only need to do this if you want
to advertise with the specific term "SBML Complaint" and use the
trademarked SBML icon on your web page, and this is not even allowed
for anybody now, because the requirements for using this trademark
have not been decided.

In any case, I would also like to point out that if we equate "SBML
Compliant" with "does everything in the SBML spec correctly" (without
getting into details about what that means), then nobody has written
any SBML Compliant software yet (possibly excluding libSBML, which
isn't actually a program) because nobody has yet implemented
everything in the spec.

Most likely there will be different levels of SBML compliance, such
as "everything that is implemented is implemented correctly, and the
parts of SBML that are not implemented are clearly documented."

As of yet there are no SBML Police (more PC). And probably never will
be.

Bruce

On Dec 22, 2005, at 11:18 AM, Howard Salis wrote:

> Pedro,
> So what you're proposing is for me to spend extra time making my
> program slower because the community demands compliance? Wow. No
> offense, but that doesn't sound like a good plan. I'd rather have a
> common file format that is so easy to use that there is no need to
> 'ensure compliance'. I will continue my intransigent position until
> SBML is usable For The Rest of Us.
>
> (Can I be the first to coin the phrase 'SBML Nazi'? Akin to Fashion/
> Grammar. Or is that too politically incorrect?)
>
> -Howard Salis
>
>
> Pedro Mendes wrote:
>
>> On Thursday 22 December 2005 12:22, Howard Salis wrote:
>>
>>> And if the standard
>>> says the MathML is authoritative...sure, why not. But my program
>>> won't
>>> read in the SBML model without the sboTerms because it's impractical
>>> otherwise. O well.
>>>
>>
>> Not exactly the spirit that all the other SBML participants
>> usually have...
>> SBML has been successful exactly because tool makers have been
>> committed to using a common file format that all could understand.
>> This has made several of us to end up programming things into our
>> software that was not originally in our plans - but we gained
>> compatibility and our users gained even more. If everyone would
>> take the intransigent position you seem to be taking then there
>> would be no SBML. O well.
>>
>>
>