In the EA2 specification, the IIOMetadataFormat class was provided to
allow applications to determine the syntax of metadata objects at
run-time. These objects use a subset of XML grammars to determine
their syntax. An application should be able to synthesize a user
interface for metadata based on the contents of an IIOMetadataFormat
object.

However, there is currently no provision for attaching human-readable
wdescriptions of the semantics of the elements and attributes that are
defined syntactically. So for example, an attribute called "length"
could be defined, but the units (e.g., inches or meters) would not be
described. Even if this information would not be useful
programmatically, it could be usefully included in a GUI (e.g., as a
tool tip).

Naturally, provision must be made for these comments to be localized.

Two other aspects of the specification of the IIOMetadataFormatImpl
class require cleanup. First, two integer constants are defined to
describe datatypes for dates and times. These are currently not used
and should be removed.

Second, it is unspecified what happens when a non-existent attribute
is queried, or id a null value is passed for an attribute name. The
behavior in such cases should be specified.