Re: Semicolon after entities

On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>>
>> If you first specify a requirement on documents (always use ";") and
>> then specify mandatory error processing related to it (browsers must
>> recognize entity references without ";"), then you have effectively
>> defined the error as a feature, though a deprecated one. But you can
>> proclaim that you have now defined a stricter version of the language.
>
> No, if you say something is non-conforming, it's non-conforming.

So what? You still have defined an error as a feature. Who cares about 
document non-conformance in a particular issue when software processing 
the documents is required to process non-conforming documents in a 
specific way and it actually does that? It's like saying that the use of 
the word black as color value is non-conforming but if it is used, 
programs must interpret it as #000.

> Whether
> the error handling is defined recovery, reverse-engineered undefined
> recovery, or a fatal error has no effect on how strict the language is.
> The language's strictness is up to its conformance criteria.

Conformance as such is relevant only in situations where conformance is 
required by law or enforceable instructions. I don't think that's a common 
situation on Earth. Besides, if the conformance criteria are pointlessly 
strong (e.g., prohibiting something that still has well-defined and 
widely implemented meaning), people who make the laws or instructions 
could (and probably should) tune them accordingly: thou shalt conform, 
except for...

I wonder whether this discussion actually relates to the IE 7 madness of 
disallowing some of the valid entity and character references without a 
semicolon. It achieves nothing but breaks many existing pages.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2007 09:57:39 UTC