- From: Mark Skall <mark.skall@nist.gov>
- Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 13:49:09 -0400
- To: "Arnold, Curt" <Curt.Arnold@hyprotech.com>, "'www-qa@w3.org'" <www-qa@w3.org>
>My take is that if something is ambiguous in the recommendation, >especially if available implementations differ in their interpretation, >the tester should define tests for each of the reasonable >expectations (meaning that no implementation would pass all the test) and >force the arbiter (in this case the DOM WG) to state for the record which >interpretation was intended by vetoing the tests >they think are inappropriate (and perhaps all of them if they really want >the behavior to be ambiguous) and, ideally, issuing an errata. I strongly disagree with this philosophy. Testing is difficult enough without making the tester test for someone else's perceived interpretation. In addition, this would not foster interoperability. The sooner the tests reflect the accurate requirements of the standard, the sooner we have conforming implementations and interoperable products. **************************************************************** Mark Skall Chief, Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division Information Technology Laboratory National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8970 Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8970 Voice: 301-975-3262 Fax: 301-590-9174 Email: skall@nist.gov ****************************************************************
Received on Friday, 19 October 2001 13:48:00 UTC