Re: Comments on HTML WG face to face meetings in France Oct 08

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

> Yes. Draconian error handling was a mistake; it punishes users and
> rewards implementations that break the standard. A simple error
> recovery mechinanism would have made XML web-friendly and the world
> would, possibly, have been different.

Håkon, I very rarely disagree with you, but on
this occasion I believe you are wrong.  Why does
one need to pander to ill-formed content in order
to be "web friendly" ?  The responsibility for
producing valid XML lies 100% with the producer
(yes, I know that is a tautology) : if the
producer fails in his responsibilities, then
no-one (and, even more importantly, nothing)
can know what his intentions were.  Thus it is
far better to say "Sorry, this document is
not valid XML; please refer to the author" than
to say (in effect) "This document is invalid
XML, but we will make a guess at the author
intended; if we have guessed wrongly, and
you end up buying 100kg cocaine instead of
the DVD you wanted, then we take no responsibility :
we did our best to interpret an invalid document,
and this is the result.  Caveat emptor".

Philip TAYLOR

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 08:11:33 UTC