conformance clause + extensibility

According to our specs, what should a conformant RIF consumer do when
fed a RIF document which includes extensions it doesn't know about?

My concern is that it might well ignore the extensions, trying to
silently remove them, parsing out the bits of the document it's
expecting to find and ignoring the rest.  That seems like a
dangerous-yet-tempting practice.

A related question is what RIF consumers should do about features they
are required to implement but do not implement.  They can't be
conformant, but maybe we can still give some practical guidance.  For
instance, I think a consumer ought to give a warning or error on seeing
such features used, instead of perhaps passing them through in some
silent-failure mode.  Builtins might well just be treated as logic
functions, in BLD, in which case you'd quietly get the wrong answers.)

   -- Sandro

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 2010 04:10:59 UTC