- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 02:20:23 -0700
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: public-webapi@w3.org
On Jun 1, 2006, at 1:03 AM, Chris Lilley wrote: > > Hello public-webapi, > > In the Window spec, I see conformance for implementations but not > for content. Would a conformance category for conforming content > (ie scripts) be useful? Not clear. There are two issues that make this different from markup or stylesheet content conformance: 1) Scripts generally use more than one API in combination, for instance freely mixing interfaces from Window 1.0, DOM Level 2 Core, DOM Level 2 Events, and common but nonstandard extensions. I'm not sure how one would define conforming content in a way that accounts for this but does not make the definition vacuous. 2) In the general case it is not possible to make a validator for a script using an API; this is equivalent to the halting problem. In ECMAScript this is true even for trivial syntactic checks given the presense of eval(). That limits the usefulness of stating conformance criteria. Another important thing to note is that interoperable behavior of implementations is still important for content that is "not conformant" by whatever rule we may come up with. Given this, it's unclear how to define content conformance or what the practical benefits would be. Implementation conformance has the clear potential benefit of improving interoperability of implementations and telling authors what guarantees they may rely on. Regards, Maciej
Received on Thursday, 1 June 2006 09:20:31 UTC