(unknown charset) Re: conformance vs. compliance

On 9 Aug 2002, Dominique [ISO-8859-1] Hazaël-Massieux wrote:

> Le ven 09/08/2002 à 18:04, Alex Rousskov a écrit :
>
> > If QA WG doesn't encourage something, it would be a good policy to
> > explain why. So far, I have not seen any objective reasons why one
> > word should be preferred to another.
>
> Hmm... What about :
> Mark Skall > Let's not proliferate additional terms. We should encourage
> > the use of "conformance".  That's the word we use.
> and
> Lynne Rosenthal > compliance has been used more with a marketing
> > connotation

None of which is objective or even relevant enough to be used in an
official WG document as an explanation, IMHO. These are just personal
preferences and opinions:

"Let's not proliferate additional terms"

	Both terms are already "proliferated". There is no value in
denying established reality. Google finds about 11,000 pages with
"conformance" and about 4,780 pages with "compliance" on w3.org Web
sites:
	http://www.google.com/search?q=conformance+site%3Aw3.org+
	http://www.google.com/search?q=compliance+site%3Aw3.org+
Same searches across the Web yeild 860,000 and 8,120,000 matches, an
order of magnitude difference "in favor" of compliance.


"That's the word we use."

	That does not explain why others should us it.


"compliance has been used more with a marketing connotation"

	That does not make it good or bad (on a objective level) for
other connotations. If anything, it probably means that more people
around the world will understand your documents better if you use
"compliance".

Alex.

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Received on Friday, 9 August 2002 12:31:48 UTC