RE: [www-qa] Re: Conformance and Implementations

David, 
but would you agree that, while third party may do much better job in creating tests, final decision on spec interpretation should belong to W3C WG, regardless of whether it is the "best interpretation" or not. 

Interpretation can not be "the best", it should just come from single source to avoid chaos.


-----Original Message-----
From: David_Marston@lotus.com [mailto:David_Marston@lotus.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 6:05 PM
To: www-qa@w3.org
Subject: [www-qa] Re: Conformance and Implementations



Dimitris wrote:
>3. It is not clear who (normatively speaking) does the best job in
>interpreting the specifcation in question ((which is why the DOM TS ML
>Schema is generated directly from the DOM specs). Is it the WG who
>wrote the spec? Is it a trusted third party? Is it the member companies?
>I believe this to be the most serious problem.

I agree completely. Specifically, a third party can do a better job than
the WG by trying to deduce test assertions from the written normative
documents (at CR stage or later). Inevitably, the WG reaches a consensus
or "understanding" on some fine points that the Recommendation does not
convey. An attempt to write test cases can expose such gaps just as an
attempt to develop a working implementation would do.
.................David Marston

Received on Thursday, 18 October 2001 21:44:37 UTC