W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-html@w3.org > October 2007

RE: HTMLDocument interface for write() and writeln() needs an update

From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:06:08 +0000 (UTC)
To: David Orchard <dorchard@bea.com>
Cc: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0710252254020.10579@hixie.dreamhostps.com>

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, David Orchard wrote:
>
> Not sure why it's the opposite but I may be missing something.  The 
> advantage of allowing extensibility with an extension processing model 
> of "ignore" is that a future version of HTML could do something with the 
> extra arguments in a compatible way with this version.

Sure. But in the case we're talking about, we can't change what happens 
with the extra arguments, they _must_ be processed as described in the 
spec (concatenation) because it's common and widely interoperably 
implemented that way.


> If multiple arguments are not allowed, then there can never be a 
> compatible evolution of HTML that allows multiple arguments.

Why not? We disallowed <section> in HTML4, and allow it in HTML5, where's 
the problem? Similarly, all methods disallow more than their defined 
number of arguments, but we can add more arguments in future versions...


> Exactly akin to HTML's longstanding practice of allow extra markup and 
> ignoring unknown markup.  In general, I like the model of allowing extra 
> things and requiring they be (roughly speaking) ignored.

You can disallow something but require that it be ignored; allowing it and 
requiring that it be ignored seems nonsensical to me.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 25 October 2007 23:06:22 GMT

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