- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:19:23 +0100
- To: Karl Dubost <karl@la-grange.net>
- Cc: "www-tag@w3.org TAG" <www-tag@w3.org>
On Dec 30, 2009, at 17:54 , Karl Dubost wrote: >> - this document is feasibly valid for specification versions 1 through 8 through the application of the ignore-unknown rule to features (and be able to list which features would which version); >> - this document is strictly valid from version 9 on. > > What would it solve for the person writing a document? > > There are two main usages for validators: > 1. Checking if you author correctly. > 2. Checking if the document respect an intended semantics. It would tell you what version you're authoring against. That really shouldn't be something that authors should have to care about — if anything it's too complex. There are very few people out there who could look at an HTML document and tell you correctly whether it's 5, 4, 3.2, etc. >> I think that this is probably best addressed through a must-understand flag. Sometimes I may use a new element and if you ignore it I don't care. > > Sometimes spec writers change the semantics of an element, which makes it harder to create a stable environment. Well, spec writers may indeed do many silly things. That's one reason why we talk about writing up architectural advice :) > Versioning has two very different consequences if we are talking about authoring or consuming. Certainly, but I fail to see how version indicators help with any of the authoring-related issues: there are too many cases in which authors will get version indicators wrong for it to be a useful tool. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
Received on Monday, 11 January 2010 16:19:52 UTC