Re: [XBL] Loading style sheets

* Ian Hickson wrote:
>> Plus, I think it's wrong practice to specify a behavior in case of
>> error, because people will then design erroneous content just to
>> get the 'weird' behavior.
>
>HTML on the Web today is ample evidence that not specifying error
>handling behaviour doesn't prevent people from depending on error
>handling behaviour (over 90% of all HTML documents depend on error
>handling behaviour in browsers today, according to a survey of over a
>billion documents that I did a few months back).

No. There might have been no formal technical prose description of HTML
error handling, but it has been fairly well specified for a long time,
and specified so that achieving certain effects was easier or possible
only through reliance on error handling behavior; improper nesting of
form controls or forms in tables to remove margins is a typical example.
In this sense, your ample evidence supports Cyril's argument.

However, the conclusion to draw from this is that any error handling
must be constrained so that any desirable effect can be achieved as
easily through proper use of a technology as it could be through im-
proper use of it. One way to constrain error handling in this way is
to formally specify it so that the constraint holds. Of course, that
shows how Cyril's argument is fallicious: if implementers are free to
violate the constraint, they might do so, which in turn would lead to
content that violates the specification on purpose.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 22:35:59 UTC