On Jun 1, 2006, at 1:03 AM, Chris Lilley wrote:
Hello public-webapi,
In the Window spec, I see conformance for implementations but not
for content. Would a conformance category for conforming content
(ie scripts) be useful?
Not clear. There are two issues that make this different from markup
or stylesheet content conformance:
1) Scripts generally use more than one API in combination, for
instance freely mixing interfaces from Window 1.0, DOM Level 2 Core,
DOM Level 2 Events, and common but nonstandard extensions. I'm not
sure how one would define conforming content in a way that accounts
for this but does not make the definition vacuous.
2) In the general case it is not possible to make a validator for a
script using an API; this is equivalent to the halting problem. In
ECMAScript this is true even for trivial syntactic checks given the
presense of eval(). That limits the usefulness of stating conformance
criteria.
Another important thing to note is that interoperable behavior of
implementations is still important for content that is "not
conformant" by whatever rule we may come up with.
Given this, it's unclear how to define content conformance or what
the practical benefits would be. Implementation conformance has the
clear potential benefit of improving interoperability of
implementations and telling authors what guarantees they may rely on.
Regards,
Maciej
