Re: [Window] Conforming content

On Thursday, June 1, 2006, 11:20:23 AM, Maciej wrote:

MS> 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?

MS> Not clear. There are two issues that make this different from markup  
MS> or stylesheet content conformance:

MS> 1) Scripts generally use more than one API in combination, for  
MS> instance freely mixing interfaces from Window 1.0, DOM Level 2 Core,  
MS> DOM Level 2 Events, and common but nonstandard extensions. I'm not  
MS> sure how one would define conforming content in a way that accounts  
MS> for this but does not make the definition vacuous.

MS> 2) In the general case it is not possible to make a validator for a  
MS> script using an API; this is equivalent to the halting problem. In  
MS> ECMAScript this is true even for trivial syntactic checks given the  
MS> presense of eval(). That limits the usefulness of stating conformance  
MS> criteria.

MS> Another important thing to note is that interoperable behavior of  
MS> implementations is still important for content that is "not  
MS> conformant" by whatever rule we may come up with.

MS> Given this, it's unclear how to define content conformance or what  
MS> the practical benefits would be. Implementation conformance has the  
MS> clear potential benefit of improving interoperability of  
MS> implementations and telling authors what guarantees they may rely on.


Thanks, that demonstrates that the group has considered this and decided its not a useful conformance category. I'm satisfied with this response.

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Interaction Domain Leader
 Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Thursday, 1 June 2006 10:28:54 UTC