Re: Audience Based Validator User Interface (ISSUE-206)

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
>>  "HTML5 authoring tools MUST
>> NOT emit documents that do not conform to HTML5" to "HTML5 authoring
>> tools SHOULD NOT emit documents that do not conform to HTML5". The
>> allowed exceptions would be content author supplied attribute values,
>> which are engineers control.
>
>
> I think this would be a good change, regardless of issue 206, I do not
> believe that this must level requirement is realistic or practical.
> Any editing tool other than in the most controlled of environments can emit
> non conforming documents. I would go so far as to say there is no editing
> tool which  can guarantee that the output will always be conforming.

I think that when adjusting MUST-level requirements we should try to
replace them with more specific MUST-level requirements before
replacing them with SHOULD-level requirements.

Note that the requirement you quote is already qualified in various
ways. If we think additional qualifications are justified, can't we
add them? For instance, the spec includes this qualification:
"Authoring tools are exempt from the strict requirements of using
elements only for their specified purpose, but only to the extent that
authoring tools are not yet able to determine author intent. However,
authoring tools must not automatically misuse elements or encourage
their users to do so." We could expand this to "elements and
attributes".

I've suggested elsewhere that's some requirements could be required to
make a "complete" or "self-consistent" document (e.g. idrefs to unique
elements that haven't yet been added to a complete document would fail
that requirement). Possibly this concept would be useful here too.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2012 14:49:16 UTC