Re: The latest InstateLongDesc CP effectively contains MUST-level UA conformance criteria

On Sep 19, 2012, at 12:12 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>> (In my experience, the WebKit project and browsers based on it generally try to implement the "encourage" statements of the rendering section, at least for ports targeting desktop operating systems. And it is generally considered a bug in the spec if those requirements are not implementable for whatever reason.)
> 
> What do you mean by "generally" here? Are there known exceptions or
> are you just being careful to allow that there could be exceptions?

I don't know of deliberate exceptions, but I can't guarantee there are not any deliberate or inadvertent deviations, nor am I in a position to commit that there will never be any. I would describe our goal of implementing the MUST-level UA conformance criteria in the rest of the spec in the same way.

> 
> Whether a requirement is implementable is rather a different question
> from whether particular client software intends to implement it.
> 
> Both iCab and Opera implement the expectation: "User agents are
> expected to allow users to access long text alternative resources
> indicated by the longdesc attribute on img." So the expectation would
> seem to be "implementable".

I'm not claiming it's not implementable. Just justifying the point that these encouragements are more than just suggestions.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 07:30:09 UTC