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Re: versioning, robustness principle, doctypes etc

From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 10:03:43 +0300
Message-Id: <609810BD-CBEC-4372-AB91-FDDCE4511CEA@iki.fi>
To: www-tag@w3.org
Larry Masinter wrote:
> Conformance checks can use a version indicator (doctype for example)  
> to determine which conservative advice should be applied.

Having an in-band version indicator for conformance checking makes the  
following unwritten assumptions:

  * It's appropriate for a person opting to target an older "version"  
not to see more up-to-date advice. (Surely newer advice should be  
assumed to be better informed and, thus, better advice.)

  * If the person running a conformance checker and the person  
producing the markup are different people (or the same person at  
different times), the markup producer should choose the checker target  
"version"--not the person invoking the checker.

Have you compared the model with an in-band spec version number based  
version indicator against the following models?

  * The user of the conformance checker choosing the validation target  
(i.e. out-of-band indication of the wanted profile).

  * The user of an editor that embeds a conformance checker using  
product-specific in-band syntax (consider the Emacs mode line) to  
communicate the validation target, and the target choice may be more  
granular than W3C spec versions (making the in-band indicator non- 
interoperable).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 6 August 2009 07:04:30 UTC

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