Re: [SVGMobile12] Comment: Please give specific error-handling behaviour

On Thursday 2005-05-19 00:42 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> And is it better for the user for authors to abuse an error condition but 
> have that render the same everywhere, or for authors to abuse an error 
> condition but only have that render the expected way in the market leader?
> 
> The latter is what HTML ended up doing, which is why HTML browser vendors 
> are bending over backwards to reverse-engineer the market leader's error 
> handling. This disastrous situation, "tag soup", is one of the things that 
> the XML world is supposed to save us from. It would be most unfortunate if 
> the SVG spec was to reintroduce the problem.

Completely agreed.

I've heard a lot of noise about how much better the XML world will be.
However, with undefined error handling behavior, it won't be, as Ian
explained.  There's a big difference between identical parse trees and
interoperable behavior.  It's the latter that's needed.

(It's worth noting that there's a difference between interoperable
behavior and identical behavior.  It's sometimes hard to draw the line.
For example, should the size and color of HTML buttons be specified, or
should they follow platform appearance?  However, error-handling
behavior is pretty clearly on one side of the line.)

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
          Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, The Mozilla Foundation