Re: Standards mode and Quirks mode (was Re: [CSS21] Test Suite)

Justin Wood writes:
> Technically, unless I misread in places, we (any UA) *can* render up to a 
> point where a "mal-formedness" occurres and then either "drop" all 
> rendering up to taht point and put up a malformed error, or just leave
> all rendering up to that point and note the error. 
> 
> But to do so reliably would be harder to code than our current "get all 
> document first" method.... the "incremental rendering" (in XHTML) would 
> have to assume that any open tag is closed correctly, until it is not...a 
> bit harder than it sounds at first..,

How is this any harder than incremental rendering in HTML? 

I think that everyone agrees that a UA should not render a non-well-formed 
document; the only point in disagreement seems to be whether the UA is 
required to *ensure* the well-formedness of the document before it starts 
rendering; I don't believe that this is the case (indeed, the XHTML spec 
does not seem to describe *any* behaviour for non-well-formed documents, 
only that documents must be checked for well-formedness [at some undefined 
point in time]. Well, I checked, it's not well-formed, now what?). 

Regards,
Malcolm