Re: WebIDL Spec Status

On Fri, 27 Jun 2014, Glenn Adams wrote:
> >
> > For pointless certification purposes, you can use any random revision 
> > of the spec -- just say what the revision number is and use that (and 
> > honestly, who cares how well you implement that version -- it's not 
> > like the testing process is going to be thorough). Don't ship that, 
> > though. Whatever you ship should be regularly kept up to date with 
> > changes to the spec as they occur. (It's not an option to not be able 
> > to ship fixes, since otherwise you'd be unable to fix security 
> > vulnerabilities either, which is obviously a non-starter.) What you 
> > ship, and subsequent revisions thereto, is what you should be spending 
> > any serious amount of time testing. And for that, you shouldn't use a 
> > snapshot, you should use the latest revision of the spec.
> >
> > For the pointless certification, just as for the patent coverage, we 
> > should publish whatever revision we have and just stamp it as a REC. 
> > It doesn't matter what bugs it has. We know it'll have bugs -- the day 
> > after it's published, maybe even earlier, we'll find new bugs that 
> > will need fixing. It doesn't really matter, since it's not for use by 
> > implementors, just by lawyers and pointless certification teams.
> 
> I would respond, but it would be ... pointless.

I'm guessing you misinterpreted what I said, specifically, that you 
interpreted the "pointless" in "pointless certification" as an insult of 
some sort. To clarify, I did not mean it that way; I meant it literally, 
as in, specifically the kinds of certifications that you may be required 
to pursue for political or bureaucratic reasons but which have no 
practical purpose, as opposed to the kind of certification that serves an 
important purpose, like certifying that some software that's going to run 
a rocket passes all its tests.

Certifying that software passes tests for an obsolete version of a 
standard, when the standard's purpose is interoperability and achieving 
that interoperability requires converging on a target that we're only 
slowly reaching over many years, is at best pointless, and at worst 
harmful, which is why I stand by the advice above.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 27 June 2014 16:29:27 UTC