Re: ACTION-388: Re: [WICDMobile] Identification and [WICDFull] Identification

On Wed, 03 May 2006 11:35:56 -0700, Kevin E Kelly <kekelly@us.ibm.com>  
wrote:
> Thanks for your comments
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-cdf/2006Jan/0049.html
> and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-cdf/2006Jan/0042.html
>
> The CDF WG has overwhelming consensus that the profile parameter is
> necessary and therefore it will remain as part of the WICD profile.
>
> No changes were made in response to these comments.

As explained in  
http://www.w3.org/mid/op.s8nwdih364w2qv@id-c0020.oslo.opera.com that  
doesn't address my concerns. I haven't had a reply from the WG to that  
e-mail explaining why those concerns are not justified as far as I'm  
aware. Below are the comments I made so other people following the public  
list can read them as well:

* When a new version of XHTML is issued, say XHTML 1.2, we would have to  
update the URI to some new string. UAs can't just remove the old string as  
content is still checking for that string. That's a serious issue. Each  
time a new version of something is introduced and a new string is issued  
it has to stay permanently on the UA its Accept: header because otherwise  
content that isn't updated (lots of it isn't) will break. Also given that  
we currently only cover XHTML, SVG and CSS and likely want this to grow  
there will be lots of updates over time making it not just a 64 characters  
growth, but 64*n characters growth where n is a pretty big number. The  
problem is here that current content can't be future proofed. They don't  
know the string might change and don't know how it might look otherwise.  
So my first argument against it would that the proposal isn't forward  
compatible in any way.

* As pointed out, that's not only a problem for the UA, that's also an  
issue for content. I can currently check for WICD Full 1.0, but at the  
moment SVGT 1.3 is released or XHTML 1.2 and eithers makes some backwards  
incompatible changes I would like to know that as an author, but I can't  
really...

* It's unclear to me when UAs can add this to their Accept: header. For  
example, no UA supports the longdesc="" attribute on the <img> element in  
XHTML, yet we expect XHTML to be fully supported because otherwise the UA  
would not issue use this string, right? There are many tiny things that  
are not fully implemented which will probably not be fixed anytime soon,  
are we going to delay WICD until 2010 so we can be sure they are?

* It's also unclear what happens when a UA discovers a previously unknown  
bug in their implementation or some specification got changed that puts  
the UA into non-compliance. Does the string needs to be removed possibly  
breaking some content over almost nothing?


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 3 May 2006 18:41:15 UTC