- From: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 11:45:34 -0400
- To: www-qa@w3.org
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
Dear Ian, Thanks for your comments on the Last Call version of the QA Framework: Specification Guidelines[0] - 22 November 2004 After two weeks from now (on May 18, 2005), the lack of answer will be considered as if you had accepted the comment. Original comment (issue 1047 [1]) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2005Jan/0012.html Thank you for your comment, which the QA Working Group has accepted. We have reworded the affected section as you recommended and it now reads [2] “What does this mean? For each class of product affected by an error condition, include error-handling instructions for when an extension is not available or understood. Why care? When using a strict conforming application, users might have to deal with documents, data considered invalid because they contain errors, or extended syntactically. Developers need to know what is the expected behavior of the application in such context. Techniques There are typically two approaches: (see section 4.2.3 Extensibility from Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One [WEB-ARCH]) a so-called “must Understand” policy, as implemented in SOAP 1.2 by the mustUnderstand attribute; in this type of mechanism, a processor encountering a syntax token not defined in the specification is required to know how to process the said token or must fail for the whole unit where the token appears a so called “must Ignore” policy (as implemented in SOAP 1.2 by the mustIgnore attribute), where a processor not knowing how to process an unknown syntax token must skip part or the totality of the unit where the token appears A good way to handle these two approaches is to have a way in the syntax to distinguish which behavior is expected (e.g., mustUnderstand/mustIgnore attributes in SOAP 1.2). Which policy to choose depends heavily on the importance of the processing of the data, the user experience of applications based on the said format, etc. Do not forget to address all the classes of products. For example, an authoring tool and a rendering tool might behave in different ways.” [0] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-qaframe-spec-20041122/ [1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1047 [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-qaframe-spec-20050428/#define-error-gp -- Karl Dubost QA Working Group Chair http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/
Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2005 15:45:50 UTC