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
