Re: Microsoft's cross-document messaging and DOM Storage tests published

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> Since lots of developers will use the tests without reading the spec, I 
> prefer to have both the spec and the tests be normative. If they 
> conflict, there's a bug, and I don't see much value in pre-judging where 
> the bug is.

The reason not have the tests normative is that they can often easily 
implicitly require behavior that is not intended to be required, without 
it being at all obvious. (In a spec it's usually obvious when that 
happens, since there has to be a "must" somewhere.)

Also, it's much easier for tests to implicitly require a particular model 
without that model being thought through than it is for a spec to do that, 
since in the spec anything not said explicitly isn't required.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 00:39:22 UTC