Hi Ricardo, (moving discussion to public-webapps)
On 7/2/10 5:56 AM, Ricardo Varela wrote:
hallo all, hallo Marcos, We have a small question regarding what we interpret may be an inconsistency in the behaviours for parsing a config file as commented in the W3C widget packaging spec [1] According to the spec (latest and also older versions), the occurrences of some elements (eg: author or content) have to be zero or one
I'm sorry, the specification is unclear. It says "expected children (in any order)", but it certainly is not intended to be a restriction on authors - that is to say, it would make no sense to punish authors who put in two author elements by mistake. A conformance checker could then warn if something out of the expected (such as two author elements) if found in the document. This is defined in this yet to be published spec:
http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/widgets-pc-cc/Overview.src.html
However, on the algorithm to process a configuration document quoted below, it states: "If this is not the first author element encountered, then the user agent must ignore this element and any child nodes" It just says ignore and doesn't say to consider it as error Isn't this a contradiction in the parsing of the configuration document? We understand that it should be one of these 2 cases: a) we allow for more than one instance of author and content and let the first one take precedence (and therefore the occurrences should be "zero or more")
No, only one is expected.
b) we allow only one instance of author and content elements (and therefore the parsing algorithm has got to stop with error on further occurrences)
Certainly not: the parser is not a conformance checker. The parser should be able to flexibly handle all garbage input gracefully, as well as be future compatible (in case we want to allow more than one author or content element on the future).
Would appreciate some clarification about this, as we want to clarify what to do for our compliance tests
I hope that clarifies things. If not, I'm happy to discuss further. Also, are you making your own compliance tests or using the official ones?: http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/widgets/test-suite/
Thanks a lot in advance! Saludos! [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/
-- Marcos Caceres Opera Software
