Re: Rule breaking on the Web

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Mark Baker wrote:
> 
> By not following specs, they're not playing by the same rules that the 
> rest of the world has agreed to play by.

Actually, by following the specs, and by pushing standards compliance, 
_we_ are not playing by the rules that most of the world is playing by. 
The sad and unfortunate truth is that standards for authors are very 
widely ignored and violated. That's why the "common theme found in some 
recent attempts to improve the Web" is so focused on defining 
implementation behaviour in the face of conforming and non-conforming 
markup equally -- the non-conforming markup is more common.


> You don't change the rules just because a minority violate them.

By and large, it's not a minority. Obviously you need to find data for 
each case, and I don't know what the relevant stats are for this group and 
this discussion, but e.g. HTML is syntacticaly invalid 70% to 95% of the 
time depending on how strict you are about what is an error. That's a 
majority of pages that are syntactically invalid even when one tries to be 
as loose with the spec requirements as possible (e.g. ignoring missing 
DOCTYPEs), and it doesn't even look at things like MIME types, 
semantically-correct use, attributes values, actually following the 
element content model rules, etc. (Source: an unpublished study of several 
billion pages during the summer of last year. Other studies by independent 
researchers on smaller samples have found similar results.)


> You educate the minority so that they understand the problems they've 
> created for themselves, and appreciate the value in fixing their 
> mistakes.

Education hasn't worked so far; why do we think it should work in the 
future?


> Otherwise, over the long term, entropy would win and eventually kill 
> interoperability, or at least greatly increase the barrier to entry for 
> new players.

That's why we have to define the rules for implementations even in the 
face of broken markup -- it allows interoperability to continue regardless 
of author-side conformance, and it reduces the barrier to entry for new 
players by dramatically reducing the amount of reverse engineering 
required.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 21 February 2008 19:42:59 UTC