Parsing everything

Chris Lilley wrote to <mailto:www-international@w3.org>, 
<mailto:w3c-css-wg@w3.org>, <mailto:w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org>, and 
<mailto:www-style@w3.org> on 6 December 2003 in "Re: UTF-8 signature / 
BOM in CSS" (<mid:862788409.20031206164822@w3.org>):

> Etan wrote:
>
> EW> [...] convinced me of the case
> EW> for parsing at all costs.
>
> Probably the influence of too much HTML.

Maybe so, but not in the way that I think that you're thinking. I 
didn't mean that agents should parse in any way they choose, but that 
the specification should prescribe rules for parsing everything. My 
experience with HTML teaches me that underspecifying error handling is 
a mistake.

> I refer you to the TAG Architecture document
> http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#error-handling
>
> Principle: Error recovery
>
>   Silent recovery from error is harmful.

And immediately following this statement in the same document:

     Good practice: Specify error handling

     Format specification designers SHOULD specify agent behavior in the 
face of error conditions.

-- 
Can we narrow the distribution of this thread?

Etan Wexler.

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2003 22:07:22 UTC