Re: Conformance Criteria

Hi, Maciej-

Maciej Stachowiak wrote (on 9/21/09 11:03 AM):
> On Sep 21, 2009, at 1:16 AM, Doug Schepers wrote:
>
> It seems like deprecated and obsolete have the exact same effect on
> conformance:
>
> - MAY be implemented by implementations
> - SHOULD NOT be used by authors
>
> As far as I can tell, the difference is only in non-normative "flavor
> text". Given this, I think we should have only one concept, so people
> don't have to wonder what the difference is.

The difference is not in conformance, it's that deprecated features are 
still defined in the spec, while obsolete ones are not.

However, since you think it will cause confusion, I've removed 
"obsolete" from the spec, as a definition and as applied to features.


>> I also added an explicit warning about keyCode/charCode being obsolete
>> in the section on Keyboard Events.
>
> keyCode and charCode are used a lot in existing content. I think it
> would be unwise to say that they are optional for implementations, since
> any implementation that wishes to handle general public Web content will
> have to implement them. It further does a disservice to implementations
> to leave keyCode and charCode undefined. Also, keyIdentifier is not yet
> reliably implemented in current browsers, so a Web page script that
> wants to figure out what key was pressed has to use keyCode or charCode.
> Under these circumstances, it seems like wishful thinking to declare
> these attributes obsolete.

Fair enough.  I now say simply, "DOM Level 3 Events does not define 
behavior for either keyCode or charCode; authors should use 
KeyboardEvent.keyIdentifier instead, in conforming DOM Level 3 Events 
implementations."

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2009 03:21:50 UTC