- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:02:00 -0700
- To: public-html@w3.org
I was looking through the specification this evening trying to form an argument about whether certain behavior was conformant, and I found myself having trouble finding some user-agent conformance requirements that I expected to find in the specification. In particular, I was looking for requirements that said that certain information must be irrelevant past a certain point in the process. An example of such a conformance requirement is in HTML 4.01: # A user agent must ensure that rendering is unchanged by the # presence or absence of start tags and end tags when the HTML DTD # indicates that these are optional. -- http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/conform.html#conformance I think this type of conformance requirement can be useful, because it allows making stronger claims to authors that "X doesn't / shouldn't matter". When user-agents follow these requirements, then it reduces the space of things that authors (particularly knowledgable ones) need to test when they encounter unexpected behavior in user-agents. For example, while the parsing algorithm describes how to construct a DOM tree, I couldn't find conformance requirements restricting differences in other behavior to differences that are present in the DOM tree. I could imagine similar conformance requirements related to semantics defined by the specification, though in many cases such requirements would need to be worded carefully to restrict the limitation to the handling of the elements, attributes, and values defined in HTML5, so that future extensions would be conformant. Was it intended that the specification not have this type of requirement? Or was it an accidental omission? Or am I missing requirements somewhere in the specification (which is easy to do, although I tried looking in what I thought were the obvious places)? -David -- L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
Received on Tuesday, 29 June 2010 06:02:30 UTC