Re: effective date of conformance

At 10:33 AM 9/22/99 -0500, Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
>
>Issue #4 Dating conformance claims
>There is an implication in the last statement of the note that as user 
>agent support for features changes with each new release, content 
>developers are responsible for keeping their pages up-to-date in  order to 
>ensure continued conformance.   Ian writes, "However, if you conformed one 
>day and someone produced a browser the next that did the right thing, you 
>would suddenly no longer conform. Conformance claims should probably be 
>dated so that you can continue to conform to a specific set of guidelines 
>(5 May version, for example) as of a specific date. While I see the value 
>in encouraging authors to remain up-to-date, they might have the feeling 
>that the rug of conformance could be pulled out from under them at any time."
> 

This sounds like an enforcement issue.  Conformance claims need to be
evaluated in terms of the widely available technology when the content
claiming to conform was published.

It is not clear that a separate date is needed for the conformance
evaluation apart from the [last-change] date of the server resource. 

If one wants to date selective stuff in the page we should follow DSIG
practices and not re-invent this paricular wheel.

Al

Received on Friday, 24 September 1999 10:41:46 UTC