Re: Conflicts between W3C specs and ES5?

Catching up of this thread now. Sorry for the delay.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On Nov 17, 2009, at 11:03 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> On Nov 17, 2009, at 7:32 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>> Property Enumeration is an ongoing issue in Ecma TC39. I believe you did
>> some useful testing and posted results to es-discuss. Anyway, I'm not
>> picking on everything in the wiki page, and probably Mark was not either. He
>> was on the look-out for stuff to spec in Ecma, and probably for stuff we
>> want to deprecate, at a guess. I'm with him on that last point.
>>
>> I think he was concerned that there were other unflagged direct conflicts
>> between HTML5 (or other W3C specs) and ES5, hopefully we have laid that to
>> rest.
>>
>> Mark, please speak up. I believe TC39 members including Mark and me are
>> concerned about both unflagged conflicts *and* over-specification of legacy
>> stuff we don't think should be formalized if it can be deprecated
>> effectively.
>>
>
Yes, yes, and yes. I started this thread worried only that the wiki page
might lead to the discovery of further direct conflicts. This does seem to
be laid to rest. The other concerns raised in this thread are also valid
concerns. The most interesting and problematic issue is how standards
committees (including W3C and TC39) should deal with stuff that browser
makers currently feel obliged to implement because the others do, but that
all would rather see disappear if that were possible to arrange..

For me the aha moment came from a comment you made during our WebIDL
discussion with Cameron. I suggested that such things should be documented
the way ES3/5 does in its Appendix B: Non-normative with descriptions of
existing consensus behavior. You suggested instead the notion of
normative-optional, that there is no normative statement that one must or
even should implement these features. But if one does implement them, then
this is normatively how one must/should implement them. You suggested that
this is how Appendix B is viewed in practice.


-- 
   Cheers,
   --MarkM