Re: Action item on the virtues of error-handling

Dave,

The purpose and the mechanism are clear, but have nothing to do
with whether the text is descriptive or prescriptive.  It's the former,
as you correctly noted below.

Cheers,
Walden

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>
To: "'Walden Mathews'" <waldenm@optonline.net>; "'Dan Connolly'"
<connolly@w3.org>
Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 2:42 PM
Subject: RE: Action item on the virtues of error-handling


:
:
: > The presence of the language: "the installed base of HTML user agents"
: > makes the "must" interpretation infeasible.  Would the spec
: > be requiring
: > something of an "installed base"?
: >
:
: The text preceeding the :
:
: "To facilitate experimentation and interoperability between
:    implementations of various versions of HTML, the installed base of
:    HTML user agents supports a superset of the HTML 2.0 language by
:    reducing it to HTML 2.0:"
:
: Provides a purpose (to facilitate ..) and a description of a mechanism to
: support the purpose (by reducing it to).  Maybe it could have been worded
a
: bit better "HTML user agents support a superset..." but I still think that
: does not diminish the (what I call) must ignore rule following the colon.
:
: I think that "the installed base" phrase is probably irrelevent because
the
: installed base of HTML user agents is the set of user agents that are in
: existance at any given time. And an HTML user agent is a user agent that
is
: compliant with HTML.  So "installed base" as part of mechanism description
: doesn't take away from the actual conformance test.
:
: Further, I believe the text before the colon supports my position that
: experimentation (evolution/exensibility) are desirable properties and are
: acheived by a must ignore rule, which is described after the colon.
:
: Cheers,
: Dave
:

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 15:32:41 UTC