Matthew Garrett wrote:
> A spec that allows two conformant implementations to differ to such a
> degree that it's impossible for an application to work sensibly in both
> implementations is a *bad* *spec*. The only argument anyone had against
> that was "Oh, nobody would implement the spec in that way", which is
> another huge blaring warning that it's a bad spec. There was a simple
> and straightforward way of handling this, which was to rewrite the
> problematic parts of the specification in order to constrain
> implementations. But nobody bothered, and so it continues to be a bad
> spec.
It's not a bad spec, it's a future-safe spec!
It does not make sense to specify things which do not NEED to be specified.
It needlessly constrains future implementations which may be (and possibly
NEED to be) totally different. The spec cannot mandate that some action
makes the icon blink because that assumes that there's an icon in the first
place and that the hardware allows making it blink. What about non-visual
representations, e.g. for users who cannot see those small icons for
whatever reason, and/or on hardware which doesn't even have a display in the
first place? (That example was brought up by the KDE developers in the XDG
thread.) It's not the spec's business to make your shell not suck, it's the
shell developers' business!
And why do we have to specify common sense? It was obvious to everyone
involved that the bad implementation would be bad. Are you going to require
a spec on drawing circles to specify that the circumference of the circle
must be between 355/113-2^-21 and 355/113 times its diameter? ^^
Kevin Kofler
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