RE: [css-flexbox-1] Untestable assertions

On Monday, April 15, 2013 9:52 AM Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> 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.

Ahh but we have to verify normative statements in the spec that have testable assertions. And in these cases they are testable assertions.

> > 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.

I am neither when I am writing test cases. I am a verifier of the specification. If there is a normative statement I then need to write a test that can be verified and conformed to? In these cases I can write the tests but I can't easily verify that authors are conforming. Also how would we submit implementation reports for 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.
> 
> 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.

Please point me to more situations like this. I will raise issues because they require tests to test authors' compliance with something. All the other cases I have seen similar to this right now are in notes, which aren't normative.

> > 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?
> 

Yes really. It's easy to fix these simple grammar mistakes I have pointed out. I have edited specs and I know it takes only 5-10 minutes to make simple edits like this.

--
Thanks,
Arron Eicholz

Received on Monday, 15 April 2013 17:33:22 UTC