Re: declarative expressons in WF2

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> Browsers need to be interoperable when the input is 
> non-conforming. For example, if the expressions have side effects, 
> the side effects should guaranteed to happen under the same 
> conditions and in the same order in different browsers.

Browsers conform to a variety of standards and they also introduce 
varations of their own, in part due to innovation, but also due to 
inevitable differences in the development process and in adhererence 
to the spirit and the letter of standards. In many cases, standards 
represent the aspects of behavior that people were able to reach 
agreement on and leave out the areas where they were not, e.g. due 
to a need for backwards compatibility with previous implementations 
or a difference in commercial focus and development priorities.

It is therefore impractical to guarantee exactly the same behavior 
for all scripts for event handlers and yet who would argue that 
event handlers should be dropped. The same holds true for an 
declarative representation of event handlers. You would throw the 
baby out with the bath water as we say in in the UK.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Monday, 26 March 2007 09:20:41 UTC