[whatwg] Discussion on machine-checkability on public-html

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0251.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0252.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0254.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0256.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0278.html
> 
> As a summary of what might need changing in the spec, I highlight these
> paragraphs (from message 0256 above):
> > A machine-checkable criterion should probably be defined to be a
> > criterion the conformance to which is a decidable problem (in the
> > computer science sense) given a document (Content-Type and finite
> > byte stream) and the knowledge embodied in the spec and the normative
> > references.
> > 
> > That is, the program computing whether a given document conforms to a
> > criterion should not be required to consult outside resources and
> > should not embody arbitrary knowledge that isn't part of the spec
> > (with normative references).

I don't understand how the spec doesn't already say all this in the phrase 
"machine-checkable".


> However, I also wrote:
> > As a side note: For extra usefulness, a checker can have knowledge
> > about particular URI scheme-specific requirements. Different choices
> > here cause a theoretical problem. If we want to remove the
> > theoretical problem, the spec could enumerate a closed list of URI
> > schemes that conformance checkers must know about. (Forbidding the
> > application of knowledge about common schemes like http, https and
> > mailto would be silly.)

I don't really see what the problem is here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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