- From: Arnold, Curt <Curt.Arnold@hyprotech.com>
- Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 10:31:58 -0600
- To: "'www-qa@w3.org'" <www-qa@w3.org>
Mark Skall wrote: > So the only confusion comes when something is ambiguous. In > that case, I would agree that the standards body >(in this case W3C) should make the > interpretation. However, the tester should not test for > something that is not clear in the standard. > The standard needs to be revised to reflect > the intent. Only after this occurs, can a test suite test for that > requirement. Until then, the test for that requirement should be > withdrawn. Standards developers must stand behind the wording in the > standard. My take is that if something is ambiguous in the recommendation, especially if available implementations differ in their interpretation, the tester should define tests for each of the reasonable expectations (meaning that no implementation would pass all the test) and force the arbiter (in this case the DOM WG) to state for the record which interpretation was intended by vetoing the tests they think are inappropriate (and perhaps all of them if they really want the behavior to be ambiguous) and, ideally, issuing an errata. Test authors don't do the WG any favors by avoiding debatable issues and the most concrete form to raise issues are tests.
Received on Friday, 19 October 2001 12:44:51 UTC