Re: ISSUE-61: conformance-language - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Fri, 2009-08-21 at 17:05 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Aug 21, 2009, at 16:56, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> > The original review comment had a proposal:
> >
> > "Please change the draft so that document conformance does not
> > depend on author's intent at all."
> >  -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Aug/1187.html
> >
> > Is that insufficiently concrete?
> >
> > I'd like to see that proposal get some consideration.
> 
> Obviously, validators cannot check for conformance criteria that  
> depends on the author's intent.
> 
> However, the very concept of semantic markup is useless unless markup  
> is used according to the intended meaning. Therefore, I think it is  
> even interop-sensitive (in the sense that receivers process the  
> messages in ways compatible with sender expectations) that authors use  
> markup according to the specified semantics.

OK... I suppose that makes sense. The way I'm used to seeing
it specified is

  <li> means list item

and if the sender says <li>, the reader is allowed
to conclude that the sender meant list item, and
if the sender didn't mean list item, then the
miscommunication is the sender's fault.

I suppose it's sort of six of one, half dozen of the other...
I suppose I can just squint my head and read "<li> must be used
as a list item" as "<li> means list item" and substitute
"the document is non-conforming" for "the miscommunication
is the sender's fault".

In a strict mathematical sense it's very strange
that the same sequence of characters
(or DOM structure) could be conforming when sent by a sender
who meant one thing and non-conforming when sent by a sender
who meant something else... but I suppose I can live
with that too if I squint and read generously...
i.e. read "the document is non-conforming" as
"the sending of the document is non-conforming".

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 21 August 2009 18:20:47 UTC