Re: HTML5 and XML syntax

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:31:17 +0100, <temp17@staldal.nu> wrote:

>> Because it means that if a well-formedness error accidentally slips  
>> into the markup, then end users aren't presented with a Yellow Screen  
>> of Death, describing an error that they probably won't understand and  
>> can do nothing about.
>
> If the author look at his own page before final publication, he would  
> also get a YSoD and be forced to correct the error. That would be a good  
> thing.

All the cool kids these days don't just write a document, check it,  
publish and forget about it. They accept comments and trackbacks, too, and  
trackbacks can come in any character encoding without declaring it. Are  
you sure your system is bug-free and won't slip through an error somewhere?

    http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment


Another story, if you will:

Consider that you make a site for a client, in XHTML, but served as  
text/html to IE. You use a popular CMS so that the client can update the  
site himself. The site validates and all is nice and dandy, a work well  
done.

Now 6 months later the client updates the front page on his site and  
forgets to escape an ampersand. The client doesn't notice because he uses  
IE. Suddenly the client is locking out customers without knowing about it.  
You don't know about it either because you're not paying attention to his  
site. Users who get the malformed error page don't report the problem but  
instead go to a competitor who has a site that works. Time passes and the  
page continues to be malformed.

The above story is true, as you might have figured.

    http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/11/draconian

Now that site seems to have been redesigned and is HTML, but I remember  
checking after a month or two after Anne wrote that post and it was still  
malformed.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 28 January 2008 14:04:39 UTC