- From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:41:13 -0500
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, public-html@w3.org, public-xml-core-wg@w3.org
Henri Sivonen scripsit: > XML is fragile *by design*! (Draconian error handling and making > external entity loading permitted but optional. The real fix would be > to move to XML5 with robust error recovery and no external entities.) Unless every single possible sequence of bytes is a legal HTML5 document with a fixed interpretation, HTML5 is just as fragile: it's just far, far more complicated to specify and parse than XML is. XML 1.x is complicated enough: why on earth would we want to make it more complicated? (I'm not speaking for the XML Core WG here, but I suspect the WG would give a similar reply if asked.) A long time ago in a place called Cornell, there was a language named CORC, in which all programs, however syntactically erroneous, were guaranteed to run. It even did spelling correction on the names of unknown variables. (There are 6.5 Mghits for "HMTL", yet the HTML5 spec is not capable of dealing with such a simple and common error sensibly.) In context, it made sense to do so, because it was an ancient punched-card batch system, with 24-hour turnaround on execution, and it was only used to write dinky student programs anyway. Somehow, this trend didn't take over the world, though. Most programmers *want* draconian error handling of their code. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan It's the old, old story. Droid meets droid. Droid becomes chameleon. Droid loses chameleon, chameleon becomes blob, droid gets blob back again. It's a classic tale. --Kryten, Red Dwarf
Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 15:41:52 UTC