- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 16:16:19 +0200
- To: www-tag@w3.org, Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
- CC: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
On Saturday, June 1, 2002, 12:56:30 AM, Keith wrote: >> So effectively I _think_ you're agreeing that specifications by >> themselves are more or less useless without requiring conformance from >> the implementations whose results _are_ the specification as far as most >> users and developers are concerned. KM> not useless - they do serve as a specification that implementors KM> at least consider attempting to adhere to - but this prevents neither KM> bugs nor proprietary extensions nor failure to implement new features KM> in a timely fashion. KM> otoh, a requirement in the specifications to change functionality in KM> a way which causes more pain to users (e.g. forbidding browser KM> interpretation of improperly-labelled content) is highly likely KM> to be ignored. That makes it sound like an absolute. "more pain" is easy to argue, in practice it is not a question of more or less pain, which would be easy, but where the pain shows up and how long after the content originator has moved on to other things (ie unmaintainable content, or content succeptible to unexplained mysterious breakage in areas apparently unrelated to actual changes). -- Chris mailto:chris@w3.org
Received on Monday, 3 June 2002 10:17:28 UTC