should profiles be a separate, optional, section in capabilities

Having gone through the SAML and ID-FF spec process, I am a bit worried 
about the fuzzy language around profiles in the spec which gives 
implementers a choice about how things are sent over the wire. (And its 
inclusion as what looks like a sidebar.)

I would be much happier if Profiles was its own separate section. Sure, 
only Opera and Firefox implement runtime-configurable profiles (at 
present) which means it would likely look something like below which 
removes instances of 'should' and provides something more concrete for 
future implementers to reference.

-adam

3.3. Profiles

If a WebDriver implementation has runtime configurable profiles, the 
implementation must support configuration of them as a Capability. This 
may be modelled in code as a "Profile" object, leading to code such as:

         profile = Profile("some/user/directory")
         capabilities = MutableCapabilities()
         capabilities.set('profile', profile)
         driver = RemoteDriver(capabilities)

In this example, the profile represents a directory on the local disk. 
The contents of this directory must be serialized as a base64 encoded 
zip file to allow it to be passed as a string.

Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2012 10:29:18 UTC