Re: Conformance requirements related to differences that must not matter

On 29.06.2010 10:48, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, L. David Baron wrote:
>>
>> Was it intended that the specification not have this type of
>> requirement?
>
> Yes.
>
>
>> 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.
>
> If there are concrete examples of things that are apparently conforming
> that shouldn't be, please let me know.
>
>
>> 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
>
> This requirement is over-restrictive and is in fact ignored by several
> user agents, including Firefox -- for example, the "view source" feature
> of Firefox clearly parses HTML, and is therefore a user agent subject to
> parsing rules for conformance, but it _does_ change its rendering based on
> the presence or absence of start and end tags -- and it doing so is indeed
> an integral part of the feature; not doing so would be a serious UI bug
> (and one that Firefox has in the past had, in fact).
> ...

That doesn't make any sense at all.

"Displaying the source code for debug purposes" != "Rendering".

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 29 June 2010 12:58:44 UTC