Design principles
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The Judgment Pack Specification is governed by the following design constraints.
Representation before execution
A pack may represent valid organizational knowledge even when a particular runtime cannot execute all of it. Runtimes must disclose unsupported capabilities rather than silently reinterpret content.
Conformance is not truth
Validation demonstrates agreement with a contract. It does not establish that a source is accurate, an interpretation is faithful, or a decision is appropriate.
Evidence is not authority
Evidence supports claims. Authority permits actions. The two must not be inferred from each other.
Unknown is a first-class result
Missing, conflicting, or inapplicable information must not silently become false, zero, or an
empty value. Portable decision rules declare what happens when their conditions cannot be resolved.
No hidden executable semantics
Normative behavior cannot depend on prose prompts, host-language functions, network calls, model outputs, environment variables, or vendor extensions that are not declared as required capabilities.
A small stable core
The core should standardize only concepts required for exchange. Industry vocabularies, runtime targets, evaluation methods, signatures, and enterprise governance should evolve as profiles.
Independent implementation
The prose specification, schemas, and conformance cases—not any single vendor's codebase—define portable behavior. A stable feature should have at least two independent implementations.
Honest partial support
Tools may support subsets during the research phase, but they must report their capability set and must not claim full conformance.
Safe extensibility
Extensions are namespaced and preserved. An implementation that does not understand an optional extension ignores its semantics without deleting it. Required extension semantics must be declared explicitly and prevent unsupported consumers from claiming full interpretation.
Portability over convenience
The normative carrier is JSON. Human-friendly authoring syntaxes may be added only when their conversion to the normative model is explicit and lossless.