Re: [css-flexbox-1] Untestable assertions

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Arron Eicholz
<Arron.Eicholz@microsoft.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, April 13, 2013 12:10 PM Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> 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.

And *I'm* pointing out that we don't test authoring conformance
criteria.  That's for validators and evangelists to do.

> 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?

No, you need to ignore those requirements, because they don't apply to
you.  You're an implementation, not an author.

>> 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.

No, this is literally used everywhere.  Every single time a validator
raises an error, it's because of an authoring conformance criteria.
These are sometimes implicit rather than explicit, but that's largely
because we simple don't care as much about being precise with
authoring conformance.

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

...really?

~TJ

Received on Monday, 15 April 2013 16:52:36 UTC