Re: Conformance confusion

> 
> I will readily admit that I do not particularly understand the entire 
> issues of conformance and testing. I am aware that the issues are 

I'm not clear of the context of the question, but standards in a
commercial environment, as against the original RFCs which were in
a mutual cooperation environment, need to have something that can
be used to contractually define whether or not the standards are
being complied with, without the need to call in a jury to apply
reasonablenss tests.

Conformance tends to refer to a list of things that an implementation
must do before it is considered to comply with the standard, and testing
to the process that mechanically demonstrates that it does do so.

Some standards have multiple conformance levels, allowing people to
partially implement the standard and still claim to be fully conformant
to a subset of the standard, such that users can limit themselves to that
subset and still have many implementations that will work.

Although the WAI guidelines have three conformance levels, they are not
mechanically testable, so they are problematic from this point of view.
Things like Bobby attempt to do the mechanical tests, but people
can be misled into believing that they fully test conformance.

Received on Saturday, 27 October 2001 05:37:55 UTC