Re: Conformance and Implementations

At 11:44 -0600 2001-10-08, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>Thus, I would not recommend wasting time on developing a complex
>system of conformance rules and procedures. Something like IETF
>conditional/unconditional conformance levels are good enough. When I
>see a "conforms to XYZ" claim, I take it with a grain of salt. It is
>still useful information for me (at least they know about and probably
>read the XYZ standard), but I would not rely on that claim to be 100%
>true or accurate.

Oh no, it's no a system to claim more conformance. Conformance is 
still an open  issue to be solved. You can just see it as a way to 
declare what's and what's not implemented inside a product.

I think, people would be happy, to have such a list when they are 
using a product. At that time, people claim: "I implement fooML", but 
it doesn't mean anything for users, because you can implement only 
<tag_001> of the fooML specification which contains almost 100 tags.

If people implementing specs claim "I implement fooML and this is the 
list of  implemented features as a list of elements and a list of 
attributes for each individual element."

This claim doesn't say anything about conformance. Is the feature 
right implemented, is it compatible with other tools, etc? It's just 
a list of what it's done and what's not. IMHO, it's an improvement, 
because now we don't know at all what's inside a product.

It can be seen as an improvement for the user.
It could help a small developper to see exaclty what he's 
implementing :) (good start or index for a documentation)
it could be the first step towards real conformance, and maybe 
certification in the future.


-- 
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
           http://www.w3.org/QA/

      --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 14:18:16 UTC