- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:03:47 -0800
- To: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Cc: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, Dean Edridge <dean@dean.org.nz>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Jonas Sicking wrote: > Several people has asked for a spec without error handling. I'm not > sure why defining error handling is considered a bad thing. Is it > because people are worried that by defining error handling people will > rely on it, whereas people shouldn't rely on undefined behavior so if > we don't define error handling then people won't rely on it? Yes. Error handling is fine. Error correction is much more problematic. It makes the spec far harder to understand and implement. In essence, the path taken by HTML 5 is that there is no such thing as a document which is in error. All byte streams become legal HTML documents. That's not how they phrase it, but that's the effect. It's an interesting idea, and might even work (though I'm skeptical) but it very much raises the bar for implementing parsers, and is contrary to the design of XML at a very deep level. In essence, it is a fundamental rejection of one of the core values of XML. It is the polar opposite of draconian error handling. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Refactoring HTML Just Published! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 06:04:25 UTC