Re: Support Existing Content

Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>> On May 1, 2007, at 8:19 AM, Gareth Hay wrote:
>>> To address the point I do understand, I agree, no one is perfect, but
>>> are you really suggest something akin to using a C compiler to take
>>> some pseudo code input and attempt to produce executable code, by
>>> hook or crook?
>>
>> A C compiler runs on the developer's machine. This is different from
>> content produced by one party and consumed by many others using a
>> variety of tools, where there is more benefit to being lenient in what
>> you accept. 
> 
> That is exactly the situation that obtains with "C" programs.  One
> person writes code, others attempt to compile it using their
> compiler, their libraries, their operating system ...  A pretty
> good parallel to the way HTML is produced and consumed, in fact.

C has well-defined error handling for when built-in functions are called
with bad input.  There is no such definition at the moment for HTML
(outside of WA1)/

Also, C code often has to fallback to the lowest common denominator: if
you want to use (for example) the `inline` keyword on a wide variety of
compilers, you need to have fallback for implementations which do not
have that keyword.  Backwards compatibility is a big concern unless you
control all aspects of the system your code will compile and run on.

I think this might be stretching the analogy a bit, but I think it was
stretched to begin with.

Andrew Sidwell

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 23:05:02 UTC