- From: Allen Wirfs-Brock <allen@wirfs-brock.com>
- Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 20:46:33 -0700
- To: timeless <timeless@gmail.com>
- Cc: Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au>, Garrett Smith <dhtmlkitchen@gmail.com>, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>, Alex Russell <slightlyoff@google.com>, public-script-coord@w3.org, Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.com>
On Aug 3, 2011, at 8:09 PM, timeless wrote: > Isn't the key request for a way to be forward compatible with > ECMAScript? I think we want to be able to say "add all non mutating > methods from the ECMAScript Array.prototype to the Foo object", so an > implementation which supports a newer version of ECMAScript would be > allowed to add whatever additional methods ECMAScript has added since > WebIDL and FooSpec referencing WebIDL were published. Yes, I think this is the goal. Try to keep the specs loosely coupled. > Without a > referenceable thing, I don't see a way for WebIDL to do this. I can provide appropriate language for this, if Cameron needs it. > It's > fairly likely some implementation will miss a minor thing when > building the list. Several times I seem mentions in this thread that implementors are likely to make mistakes like this. In writing the ECMAScript spec. we try to write a precise specification but we assume that it is the responsibility of the implementor to get it right and we expect that they will. The help we provide is via our test suite which is an independent effort from the actual specification. > OTOH if ECMAScript is asked to maintain the list, > it's more likely they'll get it right (and reviewers of that spec are > more likely to catch omisions/errors). Or we won't and then we'll have an inconsistency between normative and non-normative material in the spec. That's why I prefer to have just one normative source and to trust implements (and test writers) to get it right. Allen
Received on Thursday, 4 August 2011 03:47:20 UTC