Re: Conformance of documents using IDL attributes outside the spec

Philip Taylor <[email protected]> Fri, 08 Nov 2013 14:42:03 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.html.general
Organization	The Chainhurst Consortium
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> My understanding is just the opposite: conformance is defined for
> documents, not just for serializations. For example, a document that
> inserts, with JavaScript, a title element inside a body element is just
> as nonconforming as one with the markup <body><title>foo</title></body>.

Hmm, well, I don't want to derail what is clearly an important question
(otherwise you would not have asked it) with philosophical issues, but
it does seem to me that conformance needs to be a static concept rather
than a dynamic one, otherwise a document that performs a non-conformant
modification of the DOM IFF the date is (or was) 01-01-2000 would
have to be defined to be /conditionally/ conformant (and the same if the
trigger for the non-conformant DOM modification were to find the mouse
at a particular pair of co-ordinates but no other, and so on).

Anyhow, to try to keep the thread on-track, can you refer me to
a W3C (or similar) document that defines conformance in the terms
to which you believe it to refer, rather than one that defines it
in terms of a static serialisation (preferably not an HTML5-related
document, for reasons you fully understand and which we need not go
into here) ?

If you /are/ correct in your hypothesis (which you usually are),
I hold out little hope for there ever being a W3C conformance checker
that will check pages for dynamic conformance under all possible
conditions.

Philip Taylor