Re: Support Existing Content

Gareth Hay schrieb:
> 
> 
> On 4 May 2007, at 08:44, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
>>>>
>>> Do you honestly think that by encouraging people to write more 
>>> correct code is not a help to anyone?
>>
>> To answer for myself: yes, I think encouraging people to write 
>> conforming content is somewhat helpful (though less so than 
>> encouraging them to actually test in multiple browsers). But I do not 
>> think /forcing/ people to write conforming content is a help to 
>> anyone, especially if author mistakes then become problems for the end 
>> user. And when we are talking about draconian error handling to the 
>> point of refusing to render, we're talking about forcing, not 
>> encouraging.
>>
>> So I'd say that I don't think "pro-actively fix[ing]" the web is a 
>> help to anyone, if that is taken to mean an attempt to force conformance.
>>
>> What's your answer?
>>
> I think that the situation we have just now is untenable. I don't think 
> any form of (your definition) encouragement is going to work, after all, 
> people have been pretty much free to go your way for years and haven't, 
> so let's try (my definition) encouraging them a different way, which 
> prevents them from getting things wrong.
> 
> [aside: maybe it's because I grew up with "Segmentation Fault" fatal 
> errors that I don't see that kind of error handling as "wrong"]
> 
> I think "draconian" error handling leads to a much more educated author.
> Doesn't  "Parse error : line 5" - tell you all you need to know?

What kind of errors do you mean? Ill-formed according according to XML, 
an inline element containing block-level elements, a missing "alt" 
attribute, unknown elements/attributes/attribute values ...?

--Dao

Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 09:17:59 UTC