Dave, The purpose and the mechanism are clear, but have nothing to do with whether the text is descriptive or prescriptive. It's the former, as you correctly noted below. Cheers, Walden ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com> To: "'Walden Mathews'" <waldenm@optonline.net>; "'Dan Connolly'" <connolly@w3.org> Cc: <www-tag@w3.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 2:42 PM Subject: RE: Action item on the virtues of error-handling : : : > The presence of the language: "the installed base of HTML user agents" : > makes the "must" interpretation infeasible. Would the spec : > be requiring : > something of an "installed base"? : > : : The text preceeding the : : : "To facilitate experimentation and interoperability between : implementations of various versions of HTML, the installed base of : HTML user agents supports a superset of the HTML 2.0 language by : reducing it to HTML 2.0:" : : Provides a purpose (to facilitate ..) and a description of a mechanism to : support the purpose (by reducing it to). Maybe it could have been worded a : bit better "HTML user agents support a superset..." but I still think that : does not diminish the (what I call) must ignore rule following the colon. : : I think that "the installed base" phrase is probably irrelevent because the : installed base of HTML user agents is the set of user agents that are in : existance at any given time. And an HTML user agent is a user agent that is : compliant with HTML. So "installed base" as part of mechanism description : doesn't take away from the actual conformance test. : : Further, I believe the text before the colon supports my position that : experimentation (evolution/exensibility) are desirable properties and are : acheived by a must ignore rule, which is described after the colon. : : Cheers, : Dave :Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 15:32:41 GMT
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