Re: XML incremental rendering, was Re: Standards mode and Quirks mode (was Re: [CSS21] Test Suite)

On Thursday, July 29, 2004, 7:34:45 AM, David wrote:


>> Until we have not such specs any attempt to render partial
>> content - (non-valid XHTML document) is a non-standard behavior.

DW> I see a whole urban myth developing here.  One needs to understand the
DW> purpose of the rule, not get hung up on an over literal interpretation.

Yes. Given that several people have shown that incremental rendering is
not contrary to the XML spec then hopefully this undesirable myth will
just die.

DW> The purpose is to ensure that a generic XML browser, or a browser for
DW> some other XML namespace can create a correct parse tree and use any
DW> style sheets.  It's also there to ensure that things that fail to parse
DW> on one browser fail to parse on all browsers.

Yup.

DW> Incremental rendering is a very desirable property, although very 
DW> much undervalued by authors,  judging by the number of pages that do
DW> nothing for a minute then suddenly appear.

In HTML, tables tended to disable incremental rendering (until CSS fixed
that).



-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Thursday, 29 July 2004 12:18:55 UTC