[whatwg] Comments/questions on 4.6 Offline Web applications

[Adam Roben]

Darin Adler wrote:
> 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.

The error handling behavior is explicit in the parsing algorithm. 
Perhaps it's not explicit as you would like, though?

-Adam