Re: Answer to Ian Hickson: Formal vs prose language normativity

* Ian Hickson wrote:
>> We do not necessary fully agree with your comments but we do understand 
>> your concerns. We came with the conclusion that it would be bad for 
>> developers if they can't move forward so we decided to keep our stance 
>> on having a rule to move forward in case of conflicts.

>This is already seen in cases where specs are vague -- implementors shrug, 
>decide on what they think is best, and implement that, without contacting 
>the working groups. Anything that can be done to discourage this should, 
>in my opinion.

There is no point in simply discouraging that, you would rather need to
change the environment such that it is more reasonable for implementers
to do something else instead. Reporting the problem to the Working Group
and waiting weeks, months or years for them to resolve the problem, or
implementing their resolution if competing implementations contradict
the resolution, or if their resolution is just proposed rather than
normative (and thus likely to change) is not typically more reasonable.
If implementers could trust Working Groups to make normative corrections
within at most a week, other resolution mechanisms would indeed not be
needed.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ 

Received on Monday, 16 May 2005 16:33:10 UTC