Re: [SVGMobile12] more on data types

> It isn't the job of a renderer to inform users of errors in the  
> content. That's the job of compliance verifying tools. UAs aren't  

But experience with the HTML authoring community has shown that only
a very small number use such tools (and they tend to be those who
actually understand the language in the first place and don't make
mistakes - or more likely, cut and paste others' mistakes.)

Internet Explorer is the only compliance verification tool used by
most small web sites and some big ones, for HTML.

One of the problems for SVG, and for HTML as commonly misinterpreted
as a page description language, is that the results are judged on the
purely subjective grounds of do they look right.

Requests to have user agent tools reject invalid content arise from the
fact that they are the only tools used to validate most content.  To 
be effective, that has to be part of the standards.  I remember talking to
one of the programming advisors at university who told me that users 
preferred the statistics package that didn't report loss of significance
errors in the computation over the one that effectively told them that
their data was almost meaningless!  Market forces tend towards mimimising
the error messages.

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2006 08:23:30 UTC