CDR: who is the audience?

Who is the intended audience for this specification?

Is it meant to be an actual specification that user agents should  
implement and that content authors should write to? Or is it meant to  
be just a meta-spec that defines requirements that other specs should  
follow?

I think it would be a sensible goal to define a baseline for cross- 
document inclusion and behavior that works regardless of "profile" or  
specific combination of languages being used. But currently, the spec  
as written appears to entirely lack testable, meaningful conformance  
criteria for either documents or user agents. I can't imagine how  
anyone could write a CDR validator for content or a CDR test suite  
for user agents. I do not see how one could check for the existence  
of interoperable implementations.

The spec should either be reworked to have useful conformance  
criteria, or it should clearly state that its target audience is  
other specs, and remove the conformance criteria for user agents and  
documents.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 2 January 2006 10:15:09 UTC