- From: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 09:57:58 -0700
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Gareth Hay <gazhay@gmail.com>
- CC: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>, "matt@builtfromsource.com" <matt@builtfromsource.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >On May 4, 2007, at 3:21 AM, Gareth Hay wrote: >> Why does there need to be a technical motivation behind my position. > >The job of working groups is to make technical decisions based on >facts and logic. If your position has no technical motivation, then I >do not see why others should consider it. The job of the Working Group is to come to a consensus specification. That consensus will include technical as well as pragmatic reasoning in its motivations. >That's because you refuse to state your reasoning. You're asserting >that nonconforming content, or tag soup, or invalid content, whatever >you want to call it, is harmful. But you haven't stated what the harm >is. I want to be clear I'm not taking a stance against (or for) tag soup. I will state that in my opinion, the harm of non-draconian error handling is that it harms interoperability. No matter how precise we intend to be in the spec, I can guarantee that there will be error cases that we do not cover or normatively specify, and since Opera, Mozilla, Safari and IE do not share actual code (or architecture), you can be pretty well guaranteed that there will be differences that fall through the cracks. By comparison, a draconian error handling system reduces the scope of what needs to be handled, to the scope of what is exactly covered in the spec - effectively paving over those cracks. >with end users being exposed to the effects of draconian error >handling, because problems haven't all been caught at the source and >solved. And this is where I agree with you - producers never catch all their errors, and users exposed to errors is a bad thing. -Chris
Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 16:58:06 UTC