- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 13:11:30 -0700
- To: "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>
- Cc: dbaron@dbaron.org, public-html@w3.org
On May 1, 2007, at 10:33 AM, T.V Raman wrote: > Somehow this this "does not compute". > > Why aren't we defining Javascript the same way as what you > describe --i.e. make every failing program "somehow work". JavaScript clearly defines error handling rules which are largely interoperable with legacy practice. Bad syntax or other errors require an exception to be thrown. It is also quite lenient compared to compiled languages like C. For example, calling a function with the wrong number of arguments is not an error. Furthermore, JavaScript content is often split into multiple scripts and event handlers. An error in one does not make the others fail. However, HTML/XML documents are usually a single unit, so truly strict error handling would lead to catastrophic failure. > Why aren't we even defining CSS that way i.e. "somehow make every > CSS rule parse and mean something." Actually, the CSS clearly defines error handling. An erroneous CSS stylesheet will still be processed with fallback rather than resulting in a catastrophic error. That doesn't mean that all invalid CSS is accepted as part of the language, just that there are requirements on consumers for how to handle invalid content. > Why is HTML special? It's not special. We'd like it to have defined error-handling rules, just like CSS and JavaScript. Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 20:11:47 UTC