[whatwg] WA1: Conformance requirements

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, L. David Baron wrote:
> > 
> > This was changed as a result of:
> > 
> >    http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004-December/002780.html
> > 
> > I'm not convinced that your suggested improvement scans better, and it 
> > may in fact reintroduce the problem in a different way (does it refer 
> > to "sections marked as diagrams"?).
> 
> OK, then why not just change the order?
> 
> # All of this specification is normative, except for diagrams, examples, 
> # notes, and sections marked as non-normative.

That's basically what I originally wrote, and as the above-cited e-mail 
says, "This could easily be misinterpreted distributively (diagrams marked 
as non-normative + examples marked as non-normative + notes marked as 
non-normative + sections marked as non-normative)".


> > > It says:
> > >   Conformance requirements phrased as requirements on elements,
> > >   attributes, methods or objects are conformance requirements on user
> > >   agents.
> > > They are?  It seems like they're much more likely to be conformance
> > > requirements on documents.  I'm having trouble finding a single example
> > > that I think is a requirement for a user agent.
> > 
> > This is referring to, e.g.:
> > 
> >    "If the content attribute is absent, the DOM attribute must return the 
> >    default value, if the content attribute has one, or else the empty 
> >    string."
> > 
> > ...or:
> > 
> >    "The event object must have its screenX, screenY, clientX, clientY, and 
> >    button attributes set to 0, its ctrlKey, shiftKey, altKey, and metaKey 
> >    attributes set according to the current state of the key input device, 
> >    if any (false for any keys that are not available), its detail  
> >    attribute set to 1, and its relatedTarget attribute set to null."
> 
> Ah, so you meant *DOM* attributes, not markup attributes.  That makes a
> bit more sense, but you should probably say so.  Still, do you have
> examples of requirements on elements?

   "The ins and del elements must implement the HTMLModElement interface:"

I can't find any examples on attributes, but I could imagine having some.

I agree that often there are requirements on elements and attributes that 
are really requirements on authors.

I'll have to go through and fix that.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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