philosophy Re: Conformance requirements on browsers

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 23:12:53 +0500, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:11:21 +0200, Charles McCathie Nevile  
> <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:29:12 +0400, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:57:05 +0200, Jukka K. Korpela
>>
>>>> It sounds illogical that a browser is not allowed to support  
>>>> <bgsound> but is allowed to support <backgroundsound>.
>>>
>>> So a bit more context:
>> [...]
>>> So new elements should not be created, you're right that that means  
>>> that there can exist situations in which it is conforming for a UA to  
>>> do so anyway. The other requirement is that such extensions should be  
>>> named as "x-vendor-feature", but again there can exist situations in  
>>> which it is conforming for a UA to use a different naming.
>>>
>>> This suggests that both "bgsound" and "backgroundsound" *could* be  
>>> vendor-specific extensions, and can be conforming if the UA vendor has  
>>> valid reasons and has carefully considered the implications before  
>>> implementing it. However, if a particular browser has just kept an old  
>>> element around since the dawn of time (or at least since before this  
>>> requirement existed in the spec), it's hard to argue that they comply  
>>> with these "should" and "should not".
>>
>> What's wrong with "there is content using this, so we support it for  
>> backward compatibility" as an argument?
>
> That can be a valid argument, but, if it is required for compat, its  
> behavior should be in the spec.

This assumes that the requirement for compatibility or the spec's coverage
of everything is sufficiently universal. That seems like a poor
assumption. If it were true, I would be worried about whether the spec
would be doing the right task.

The web is *different* in different countries, languages and markets. The
extent to which it should meet everyone's requirements is a question of
judgement. But it would appear that we can judge the question of whether
it *does* by the extent to which they are prepared to change things to
meet it. People's perceptions of their market is unlikely to be perfect. I
believe that includes the Working Group and its editors.

So the fact that a spec forbids something strikes me as a poor argument
that it is therefore not needed in some market.

> In the case of <bgsound>, Gecko and WebKit never found it being big  
> enough compat loss not to support it, and Presto even intentionally  
> dropped support.

Sure. I fail to see what useful information this provides about whether it
matters to IE.

More generally, it still appears that the assertion "things not permitted
by the spec are forbidden" is basically untrue, and that the assertion
that supporting elements not defined in the HTML5 spec (or in WHAT-WG
drafts as of today) makes a browser non-conformant is explicitly untrue.

For what it's worth, that seems like the right situation to me.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
         chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Monday, 16 September 2013 08:30:02 UTC