Re: QA Spec Guidelines and Modular Technologies

Le Dimanche, 17 août 2003, à 14:49 America/Montreal, Lofton Henderson a 
écrit :
> Now suppose Schema Part 2 did not have a self-contained Conformance 
> Clause, but pointed (normatively) to an all-Schema conformance clause 
> in Part 1 (this is all hypothetical -- I don't know actually how it is 
> laid out).  Is there any problem here?  It would seem to be all well 
> defined, and Xblah 1.0 would (by normative references) have everything 
> it needs for complete conformance specifications.

To clarify my previous message, I'm not talking about modular 
technology where the document is self consistent, but documents 
depending on others INSIDE the same technology.

+--------------------------------------------+
|              Technology                    |
| +----------------+     +----------------+  |
| | master doc     |     |  Module 1  WD  |  |
| | - conformance  |     +----------------+  |
| | - Use cases    |                         |
| | - Primer       |     +----------------+  |
| |                |     |  Module 2   WD |  |
| |                |     +----------------+  |
| |                |                         |
| |                |     +----------------+  |
| |   WD           |     |                |  |
| +----------------+     ..................  |
|                                            |
|                   Lot of possible modules  |
|                                            |
|                                            |
+--------------------------------------------+

My question is Module 1, Module 2, etc which are individual WD can 
become a REC without having the master document released. On a personal 
point of view, I don't think it's possible and it's desirable.

But it's what happening right now for some technologies like CSS 3. CSS 
3 in its working drafts refer to a document to come, but we don't know 
what will be inside this document and therefore it becomes impossible 
to know if the Module has an acceptable quality.

When a WG reach Last Call, I would like that the fundamental pieces of 
the Technology are already available. It means the framework which 
sustains the technology.

The modules should in a sense be written almost at the end. It will 
even satisfy Jeremy Carroll, because it will invite people to write 
tests for the modules to develop it and when the technology is well 
defined in term of tests to put the individual bricks together.

Right now, and if we don't do anything, we can't use QA Spec Guidelines 
against technology developped like CSS3.

Another issue which is related to that. We are often talking in our 
Guidelines (Ops, Spec and Test GL) of Specification with the 
pre-requisite that it's a complete unit of technology.

--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 18 August 2003 17:53:02 UTC