[whatwg] Comments/questions on 4.6 Offline Web applications

[Darin Adler]

On Oct 12, 2007, at 6:11 AM, Adam Roben wrote:

>>> It may be worth stating in this section what the behavior is when  
>>> a section or opportunistic caching namespace appears multiple  
>>> times. The parsing algorithm makes this clear, but it would be  
>>> clearer still to also state the behavior in this section.
>>
>> Well, that would be non-conforming. I'm not sure we want to tell  
>> authors what the error handling behaviour is when they ignore the  
>> conformance requirements... do we?
>
> I see. I was not looking at this part of the spec from an  
> application author's perspective. In light of that, I think the  
> current level of detail is appropriate.

Our experience with HTML has taught us that authors don't necessarily  
read the specifications nor conform. The behavior of web browsers  
when application authors ignore conformance requirements may be quite  
important to compatibility in practice; if it's not specified then  
the applications end up relying on the behavior of the implementation  
they test with.

So I think it's worth considering being explicit about the error  
handling. Not necessarily "for the authors", but for the benefit of  
the web browser implementers.

     -- Darin