Re: The interpretation of script

On Jan 18, 2011, at 10:12 , Michael Kay wrote:
>> Something that doesn't understand (or chooses to ignore) "norun" can do
>> so... just as you can write XSLT to process SVG as data without actually
>> rendering it.
> 
> SVG strikes me as an excellent example of something that is program or data depending on which day of the week it is.

In fact, a long, long time ago the SVG WG looked into the possibility of having both image/svg+xml and application/svg+xml to disambiguate between the two cases. That was a great exercise in discovering why having authoritative out-of-band information is bad architecture.

> If I'm embedding such stuff in my HTML page, I want to make it absolutely clear whether I expect the browser to execute/render it; and I don't want that to depend on which languages the browser happens to support.

If there are cases in which you want it to be executed, you will always depend on whether the browser happens to support it or not. I agree however that when wishing to embed data, you want to make sure that it doesn't get run.

> Using two different MIME types to make the distinction is gross tag abuse. So "norun" makes sense to me.

One man's "gross tag abuse" is another's backwards compatible syntax. The media type approach has the advantage that it requires no change to the existing stack, and that it already works. Not that I feel strongly about this, but designing for minimal impact rather than some form of elegance tends to work out better. We're talking HTML here, "abandon all elegance ye who enter here" :)

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2011 10:50:56 UTC