- From: David Marston/Cambridge/IBM <david_marston@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 14:23:01 -0400
- To: www-qa-wg@w3.org
LH>The verbiage of GL6 doesn't read too badly -- it leads me to believe LH>that this is sort of an "umbrella" guideline over the other more LH>specific ones. It might also be the catch-all, which could affect your thinking on some points. >6.1: Specify any universal requirements for minimum functionality LH>Aside about 6.1: what are "universal requirements for minimum functionality"? I think this means: identify any "core" functionality that all implementations must have. It's under GL 6 because it won't always be a level (Level 1); it could be a module or it could be implementation of only the latest spec without support for deprecated features. LH>If they may vary in a way that is not one of our DoV, is there any LH>place where we require that such a private dimension be documented? This might be a role for Ck 6.4 (special terminology). I'd hope that any variance can be portrayed as a module, if not one of the more specific DoV mechanisms, so this remains a theoretical-only issue in my view. (Extensions, deprecated-feature support, levels, and profiles can be mapped to modules readily. Class of product is a little harder to map. Mapping discretion is messy or trivial, depending on your approach.) The DoV were originally presented in a specific order that caused the general conformance stuff (now GL 6) to fall into the middle. One way to clarify this guideline would be to think about how it could move toward the low-numbered end, as Lofton suggests with his 10,000-feet remark. Can the overall planning process, as echoed in the SpecGL, be arranged in this order? 1. Scope (i.e., why does the WG even exist?) 2. Class of product (what thing(s) will be specified?) 3. Conformance strategy (how to achieve interoperability) 4. Profiles (what subgroups exist in user base?) ...then on to other DoV The above may push profiles down too far, if it has to take over the "usage scenarios" role from GL 1. Thus, 3 and 4 may have to swap. But if you take it as a goal to make the current GL 6 more about scoping the interoperability (subservient to GL 1, scoping the solution space), then you can move it up the abstraction scale and say that you only know whether you have modules after you've scoped the interoperability. (In contrast, I put deprecation, levels, discretion, and extensions lower than the conformance policy GL because they all were clearly subservient.) As previously noted, you get past all 8 DoV before hitting GL 10, which addresses the *expression* of the conformance strategy in the specs. I hope that this view of the guidelines as dependencies (GL 1 being the most independent) helps to clarify the role (and position) of the "conformance policy" guideline. .................David Marston
Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 14:30:05 UTC