docs/waves/open_spec_questions.md

Waves Open Spec Questions

Status: active Updated: 2026-03-05

Purpose

Track unresolved policy choices where implementation behavior must remain explicit and deterministic.

Questions

WSP unknown-token policy default

Scope: RQ-TRN-018
Status: resolved in T0-20
Decision: default profile behavior is strict reject for unknown tokens and unsupported extension code pages; header-lenient profile may ignore unsupported extension-page tokens and use textual fallback for extension header encoding.

WSP suspend/resume default posture

Scope: RQ-TRN-011
Options: disable by default in MVP profile vs enable with bounded state model.
Current lane: T0-11
Needed decision: default mode + promotion gates.

Capability bounds overage behavior

Scope: RQ-TRN-019
Options: session abort vs deterministic downgrade.
Current lane: T0-11
Needed decision: per-capability overage handling matrix.

WTP NACK hold-off profile defaults

Scope: RQ-TRN-007, RQ-TRN-016
Options: conservative timer hold-off vs aggressive retransmit.
Current lane: T0-18
Needed decision: default retry/backoff values for MVP profile.

WAE cache eviction and low-memory semantics

Scope: RQ-WAE-008, RQ-WAE-016
Options: minimal deterministic LRU policy vs richer multi-tier cache policy.
Current lane: T0-04, R0-03
Needed decision: explicit eviction order and user-visible error/reset behavior.

Unknown DTD host-policy completion

Scope: WML 12.x policy lanes (R0-07, WML-203)
Resolved parser policy: canonical WML 1.3 identity is recognized; alternate external DTDs use controlled section 12.4 fallback; malformed declarations fail deterministically; external DTDs are never fetched.
Remaining decision: host-visible error class and recovery behavior for strict prologue/full-validation failures.

Resolution protocol

For each question:

decide policy in one doc PR,
update affected RQ-* AC evidence lines,
update WORK_ITEMS.md ticket acceptance,
add/adjust fixture and command in SPEC_TEST_COVERAGE.md.