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

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 
> Ian, do you have a solution for it that would be strict enough with 
> regards to your expectations but still tied to the reality of the social 
> building of a standard? :)

Whatever solution the QAWG is advocating for contradictions between two 
different parts of the prose would IMHO be acceptable as a solution for a 
contradiction between the prose and formal language.

My point is mainly that I think it makes no sense to establish priority 
rules for one class of contradiction arbitrarily. What is special about 
formal/prose contradictions as opposed to prose/prose (or formal/formal) 
contradictions?

Now having said that, it is my own opinion (and apparently the opinion of 
others on this thread) that _whatever_ priorities the spec explicitly 
states regarding how to resolve contradictions, implementors will ignore 
the given priorities and just assume that the one they prefer is the 
correct one. There is no way to know whether the error will be in the 
prose or the formal language (or in one part of the prose or another), and 
so there is no way that a "tie-breaker" will actually be reliable.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 16 May 2005 20:05:31 UTC