- From: Jeff Schiller <codedread@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 17:14:14 -0500
- To: public-html@w3.org
What do the editors think of: a) put the HTML5 language in one spec (including the DOM tree): audience = content authors, user agent developers b) another spec that has guidelines for user agents to process legacy/non-conforming content into an HTML5-compatible DOM tree: audience = user agent developers That way content authors don't get the wrong idea if they're only looking at the HTML5 spec to learn it. Jeff On 5/3/07, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote: > > Gareth Hay wrote: > > > > > > On 3 May 2007, at 18:07, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > > > >> > >> On May 2, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Gareth Hay wrote: > >> > >>> I'm not trying to make lives easier on any side. > >>> The web is a mess, even you concede this point with your rantings > >>> about external advertising content. > >>> Do you want it to continue like this? or do you want to pro-actively > >>> fix it? > >> > >> What's the point of "fixing the web" if it doesn't make anyone's lives > >> easier? This is a totally serious question - a lot of people seem to > >> be advocating the forcing of valid markup regardless of whether it > >> helps or hurts people. Surely the reason for abstract goals like use > >> of conforming markup is to have good concrete effects. > >> > > It only hurts the lazy, or the uneducated author. Either can change easily. > > I'm not advocating we make HTML rocket science or brain surgery, it > > doesn't have to be hard, at the moment it /is/ hard because it id > > broken, new authors find broken ways of doing things and see nothing > > wrong "because it works". > > These are the arguments against "draconian errorhandling" that I can see: > > 1. > If we're making something that is that backwards incompatible, why not > instead go all the way and do something like XHTML2 that is a completely > new language. That way we could get rid of tags that we're only keeping > around for backwards compatibility anyway. > And at that point we might as well also use XML rather than create a new > language that needs a parser written for it. Most UAs need an XML parser > anyway. > > 2. > It's hard for authors to get things perfect. Writing bug free code has > nothing to do with being lazy or uninformed. When did you ever run into > a bugfree software program? If you want to generate something with as > strict parsing rules as that you probably want to write code that > provably creates good output. The only way I can think of to do that > would be to let servers generate DOM-like data structures that then gets > serialized before sent over the wire. > While this sounds like a good design to me, it would be a big change > from how servers work today and would significantly raise the bar for > adopting HTML5 for authors. > > 3. > The "cleanup" of the web it would accomplish is actually fairly small. > Most quirks and inconsistencies is in how things behave after they have > been parsed. The biggest one is in how things are rendered, but also in > how the DOM behaves. > And while there is some value for UA developers since they'd have an > easier time writing the parser, I see little to no value for web authors > over having relaxed, but consistent, error handling in the various browsers. > > > The result is that the price you pay for such strict error handling (1 > and 2) is very high, while the value you get (3) is pretty small. > > / Jonas > >
Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 22:14:19 UTC