Re: Normative status of author-only view of the HTML5 specification

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:50 AM, James Graham <jgraham@opera.com> wrote:
> On 06/10/2011 02:35 AM, T.V Raman wrote:
>>
>> Paul, you are correct. If the two documents disagree after the
>> one is a projection of the other, then an cinsistency points to a
>> much deper problem.
>
> It seems much more likely to point to a minor error in the redaction process
> e.g. some content accidentally being excluded from the author-only view, or
> a bug in the scripts. In such cases one would always expect the main spec to
> be right and never the author-only view. Hence the main spec should be
> normative, the author only view should not, but should include text like
> Henri suggested indicating that it is a reduction of the normative spec and
> discrepancies should be reported as bugs.

Another thing that absolutely will happen, and which should also be
clarified, is what happens when one of the two documents leaves
something undefined, but the other document does define behavior. It
will most likely be very common for the authors document to leave out
details, or simply state that something is not allowed, but have the
HTML5 spec define very strict required behavior which affects both
authors and implementations.

So we should state that if anything is left undefined in the authors
document, but the HTML5 spec defines normative requirements, then the
HTML5 specs normative requirements are the ones that apply.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 10 June 2011 20:54:36 UTC