[whatwg] Comments/questions on 4.6 Offline Web applications

[Darin Adler]

On Oct 12, 2007, at 9:42 AM, Adam Roben wrote:

> 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?

OK. Sorry, I misunderstood.

     -- Darin