[whatwg] [WF2] Conformance Requirements Issues

[Lachlan Hunt]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> 
>>  In the conformance requirements for Web Forms 2 [1], it states:
>>
>>| This specification includes by reference the form-related parts of the
>>| HTML4, ... Compliant UAs must implement all the requirements of those
>>| specifications to claim compliance with this one.
>>
>>...does this not make it impossible for any existing browsers to
>>ever conform to WF2?
> 
> Existing browsers can't conform to WF2 because they don't implement WF2.

Sorry for not being clearer, I think you misunderstood what I meant.  I 
didn't mean existing browsers as in the currently available versions, I 
meant the known browsers after they have been extended with these new 
features, as opposed to some future browsers that don't even exist yet.

> In the future they can conform to WF2 by implementing the bits of HTML4, 
> WF2, etc, that they don't support.

But there are parts of HTML4 that will never be supported by mainstream 
browsers, though most of those do relate to SGML processing, and there 
are bits that WF2 changes (such as handling <textarea> as some weird 
bugwards compatible CDATA/PCDATA combination for error handling). 
Perhaps this bit from section 2.2 Existing Controls, can be moved or 
copied up to the conformance requirements.

| Compliant UAs must follow all the guidelines given in the HTML4
| specification *except those modified by this specification*.

I couldn't find anything with similar meaning to that in the conformance 
section, but it is a conformance requirment and, as such, should 
probably be included there.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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