Re: ISSUE-133 -- How do our definition of Web Page and the Robustiness section interact?

Hi Joe,

> but I think we should add a paragraph at the start of the Robustness
> section (7.0) which says something like:
> 
> Plug-ins or external systems which render Web page content SHOULD 
> follow the Robustness recommendations and SHOULD NOT interfere with 
> any recommendations which are a MUST for the user agent. 

It sounds like you're saying that this specification applies to "plug-ins 
and external systems which render Web page content". Or only the 
Robustness section does? I believe we'd want all the spec to apply to 
"plug-ins" (I'll use that shorthand here), to the extent they made sense. 
But not all will make sense (if the main user agent display SCI in 
secondary chrome, there's certainly no need for any plug-ins to). But if a 
plug-in diddled with the identity display, for example, we'd want the 
combination to still conform (which is what your SHOULD NOT) is getting 
at. Does that make sense? The definition we've been using for Web User 
Agent, assuming a logical and, does not include most (all?) plug-ins: 

[Definition: A Web User Agent is any software that retrieves and presents 
Web content for users.]

And we wouldn't want to say a plug-in was conformant if it didn't follow a 
MUST in Robustness, for example. So overlaying a SHOULD on top of that 
might water it down. 

So is this a place for the conformance labels section I've been asking to 
strip out because I don't understand it (Thomas)? 

I appreciate your attempt to deal with plug-ins in one compact place. I'm 
just not sure it can work. Even changing the SHOULDs to MUSTs. Although 
let me take a stab and see what folks think. 

Add to the Overview (section 4.1):

Plug-ins or external systems which render Web page content conform to this 
specification if they conform to all user agent requirements that apply to 
the rendering of content (e.g. [ref Robustness]) and do not degrade the 
conformance of the user agent to any other recommendations. 

No, I still think not. We've got to list them somewhere. So that we can be 
sure, during conformance testing, that we know what we're talking about. 

I think this is worthy of its very own issue. Want to create one? We have 
guidance on what a "good" issue looks like in our wiki:
http://www.w3.org/2006/WSC/wiki/WriteGoodIssue

> Suggestion -- 
> This specification makes no specific assumption about the content 
> with which the user interacts, except for one: There is a top-level 
> Web page that is identified by a URI [RFC3986]. The Web page content
> is served as part of a Web interaction. The page's content can be 
> interpreted and rendered by some combination of the user agent and 
> plug-ins to the user agent and external systems triggered by the user 
agent. 
> The page's behavior might be further determined by scripting, 
> stylesheets, and other mechanisms.

I don't have an opinion either way on this, even after going back and 
reading the existing text. Anyone else?