Re: Support Existing Content

On 4 May 2007, at 11:15, Gareth Hay wrote:

> On 4 May 2007, at 10:54, Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> [aside: maybe it's because I grew up with "Segmentation Fault"  
>>> fatal errors that I don't see that kind of error handling as  
>>> "wrong"]
>>
>> To write from the end user POV: What is a segmentation fault?  
>> What's segmented?
>>
>>> I think "draconian" error handling leads to a much more educated  
>>> author.
>>> Doesn't  "Parse error : line 5" - tell you all you need to know?
>>
>> What's "parse" mean on a computer sense?
>>
>>> I certainly wouldn't be to adverse to
>>> 	 "This page was written as HTML5, but it is invalid. Error is  
>>> 'non-conformity - line 5'. Do you want to try this as html4?"
>>
>> Conformity to what?
>>
> I don't understand your 3 points here.
> Is viewing a website, especially if it charges, not the same as  
> buying a piece of software.
> If it doesn't work, who is to blame?
> if a program crashes your computer, and you get an error dump, who  
> are you blaming? Intel for making the chip inside? or the author?
> I'm not asking for the end user to see error messages, ever, I'm  
> asking for authors to take the responsibility to write correct code.
> I /honestly/ don't see how users are going to see these error  
> messages /if/ the author has done his job.
> (And for that matter if he /hasn't/ it's no worse than the site  
> upgrading their, say SQL db, and it not working at all.
> Do you blame MySQL or whoever for releasing a new version? or do  
> you blame the site for not checking the upgrade in a non-production  
> environment first?)
>
> Someone /has/ to take responsibility, if the author is allowed to  
> be lax, he can blame the UA vendor, and the UA vendor is able to  
> blame the author. Why can't we implement it, so it /is/ the fault  
> of the author?

7% of RSS/Atom feeds are mal-formed XML. Why don't those get fixed?  
Also, if error handling is well specified, then the UA either follows  
the defined error handling, so it is either the UA or the author's  
fault, and they cannot blame one-another.

Also, how does the author see the errors yet the end user does not?  
Bare in mind on sites like MySpace the author _is_ the end user.

>
>>> Where the browser will attempt to render the page minus the html5  
>>> doctype declaration.
>>
>> From my POV: In quirks mode then? What if the page relies on the  
>> W3C CSS Box Model? Why are we wasting CPU and memory of parsing  
>> something twice?
>>
> I'm not talking about CSS and I don't recall asking for double  
> parsing.

You are asking for double parsing –
	1. The browser parses it as HTML5, hits an error
	2. The browser reparses it as HTML4.01-compatible (as so not to be  
SGML).

Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 11:36:39 UTC