RE: [css-flexbox-1] Untestable assertions

On Saturday, April 13, 2013 12:10 PM Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Arron Eicholz
> <Arron.Eicholz@microsoft.com> wrote:
> > Section 5
> >
> > Authors must not use these techniques as a substitute for correct
> > source ordering, as that can ruin the accessibility of the document.
> >
> >
> >
> > Section 5.4.1
> >
> > Authors must use ‘order’ only for visual, not logical, reordering of
> > content; style sheets that use ‘order’ to perform logical reordering
> > are non-conforming.
> >
> >
> >
> > Section 7.1
> >
> > To avoid misinterpretation or invalid declarations, authors must
> > specify a zero <flex-basis> component with a unit or precede it by two
> > flex factors
> >
> >
> >
> > We should reword these above assertions so I do not need to test
> > authors that they MUST do something. I think we can easily say
> > ‘recommended’ or ‘should’ or even better ‘are encouraged’. Also we
> > should probably not emphasize the word. Emphasis implies that the words
> are part of RFC2119.
> 
> The words are intended to be part of RFC2119.  The fact that they can't be
> automatically tested is irrelevant, because we won't be testing them anyway
> (they're authoring conformance, not UA conformance).

I really don't care about the RFC2119 in this situation. I am pointing out the fact that we can't test author's conformance. And we cannot require authors to do anything. Authors have the freedom of choice to do things.

Also we do not write tests just for user agents to run we also write tests to confirm that the spec can be complied to. In this case the test has nothing to do with user agents it has to do with authors and you are requiring me to test authors. Do I need to go out and find two conforming authors?

> As Henrik says, this style of authoring conformance is used elsewhere, such
> as HTML.

While I agree that there may be other places that follow this same pattern. It does not justify the fact that it is incorrect to state the sentence this way. Also I have seen very few normative, if any, statements that use this particular grammar and fall into this situation. We could also make these notes and that would also solve the problem.

Wouldn't it just be easier to fix the issue since and issue was raised, than to continue to argue this point over email?

--
Thanks,
Arron Eicholz

Received on Monday, 15 April 2013 15:51:06 UTC