Conformance and fidelity

Document status: draft. Canonical source.

A conforming implementation MUST NOT silently discard semantically relevant information. Import, lowering, migration, and export operations MUST be able to emit structured diagnostics.

Initial fidelity classes are:

• lossless
• representable
• approximated
• preserved_unrenderable
• unsupported

Capability profiles will identify which optional modules and extensions an implementation can evaluate, render, mutate, and preserve.

Unknown extensions MUST be preserved byte-for-byte or canonical-value-for-canonical-value when the package/encoding permits preservation and when doing so does not violate security policy.