xmlhack: Towards better conformance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is taking action to help ensure better conformance to Web standards.

According to Janet Daly of the W3C, the consortium will have a "conformance manager" starting June, whose job it will be to co-ordinate with working groups and third parties on creating test suites and ensuring more faithful implementations of W3C specifications.

This move comes as part of a series of measures the consortium is taking to promote the adoption of its recommendations. Recently the Candidate Recommendation phase for specifications was introduced, where feedback is sought from implementors. Additionally, the recent DOM2 CR has specified that its exit condition will be two interoperable implementations.

Within W3C working groups, such as CSS and SVG, test suites are already being generated as part of the groups' activity.

It is to be hoped that this move heralds a stronger will to ensure the W3C's own members implement the Recommendations issued by the consortium, and to improve interoperability on the Web. Until this point such pressure has come largely from external organizations such as The Web Standards Project.