Re: versioning, robustness principle, doctypes etc

* Henri Sivonen wrote:
>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.

Your assumptions are based on the assumption that conformance to some
version is somehow different to conformance to a different version from
the perspective of a conformance checker. Otherwise there could not be
good advice and bad advice, only correct and incorrect "advice", and
there would be no "target version" to consider. I would regard this as
incorrect, and hence your assumptions as not implied by inline labels.

The notion of a "target version" is particularily problematic. If you
consider the inline label, or the user's choice, as necessarily correct,
there are cases where the checker could not report that the only thing
preventing a resource passing its checks is the "target version", and
it would instead generate plenty of rather meaningless errors that'd
be better reported by a dedicated tool (like one designed to aid you in
switching from one version to another).
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Monday, 10 August 2009 10:34:51 UTC