Re: Support Existing Content

Well said.
In the IETF world, this is called "be lenient in what you
consume, be strict in what you produce".

Failure to correctly document what producers should produce
risks creating a language over time where the sheer bloat created
by exception handling rules will paper over the actual language
--- and by the way this did happen in the 90's during the heyday
of tag-soup browsers; over time, browsers could render malformed
content, but not well-formed content.
kand failure to help producers fix  

Roger Johansson writes:
 > 
 > 
 > On 1 maj 2007, at 02.13, David Hyatt wrote:
 > 
 > > A spec could include elements that are considered poor practice and  
 > > label them as such, and conformance checkers could be designed to  
 > > help encourage authors to reach the highest level of conformance  
 > > possible (thus avoiding these poor practice elements).
 > 
 > I think that is necessary if HTML 5 is to gain any popularity among  
 > Web standards-aware developers such as myself.
 > 
 > Much of the current discussion could be avoided if the spec clearly  
 > said something to the extent of "Browsers must implement and render  
 > junk markup interoperably, but authors (Web designers, developers,  
 > writers, CMS tools, WYSIWYG tools, etc.) must not use any of these  
 > deprecated elements and attributes."
 > 
 > Basically a clear distinction between what browsers have to accept  
 > (all HTML that has ever been created) and what authors are allowed to  
 > use (semantic, accessible, non-presentational HTML).
 > 
 > Apologies if that is already in the HTML 5 WD. I have not had time to  
 > read every word of it.
 > 
 > Something that is bugging me (and I think others as well) is the  
 > apparent fear browser vendors have of doing anything to encourage  
 > people to create better (valid, well-formed, accessible, semantic)  
 > markup.
 > 
 > Obviously you can't display a modal dialog for each HTML error. But  
 > most browsers have an error console that logs JavaScript errors and  
 > warnings. Firefox lists CSS properties it doesn't recognise there as  
 > well. Why not also list HTML errors in the error console?
 > 
 > /Roger
 > 
 > --
 > http://www.456bereastreet.com/
 > 

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

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Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 16:12:13 UTC