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.
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