Error reporting in HTML5

Hi Team,

                I took an action last week to identify places in the HTML5 spec that deal with error handling, as part of the error logging activity. The discussion at the HTML WG F2F meeting a few weeks ago is detailed here in the notes:

http://www.w3.org/2013/04/24-html-wg-minutes.html#item04

                The HTML5 spec is literally full of error handling instructions. The primary ones that I had brought up to the group are related to multimedia (section 4.8.10):
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html#error-codes

but there are many more as well. Section 2.2 describing dependencies lists the DOM errors by name, including items such as 'TimeoutError':
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html#dependencies

Section 4.8.10.4&5 has specific algorithms around loading resources which include errors, see 'resource fetch algorithm' :
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html#network-states

There are also sections on handling numerical errors, parsing errors, etc.

In general it seems that there are basically 4 classes of errors, loosely described as:

Javascript errors
DOM errors
CSS errors
Media-related errors
Client errors that don't fit in the above categories

We should consider our options:


1.       Ignore these error classes and just go with what we currently have

2.       Acknowledge these error types need logging but put it off until later, including future-proofing existing/proposed specs

3.       Go ahead and tackle these error types now, working with the appropriate WGs

Option 1 risks being overtaken by events; option 3 enlarges our scope considerably.

FWIW,

D-