[whatwg] Syntax Highlighting [was: several messages]

[James Graham]

Jim Ley wrote:

>On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 10:59:48 +0000, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>J. King wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:04:56 +0000, Jim Ley <jim.ley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>how do you expect the feature to be tested in implementations then?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>That's a bit like saying "how do you expect to test that a UA treats an
>><em> element as emphasized"? It can't be done - all that you can check
>>is that the UA behaves in a manner consistent with the metadata being
>>provided 
>>    
>>
>
>You're misunderstanding what tested in implementations means in the
>context I was using it, unless the feature is proven to work, by
>having it existing and doing something in a user agent, it shouldn't
>be in the spec, this is why W3c specs now have the 2 implementations
>of each feature rule.
>
So what does that mean in the context of an element like <var>? There's 
no defined way in which such an element has to behave; it provides only 
semantics. Was it really necessary that implementations do something 
(anything) with such elements just so HTML 4 could be ratified? This 
case is much closer to that than a case like display:inline-block in CSS 
where there is a clearly defined behavior that could be compared between 
different implementations.