- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:51:27 -0400
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- CC: HTMLwg WG <public-html@w3.org>
On 03/22/2010 10:10 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote: > On Mar 22, 2010, at 15:59, Sam Ruby wrote: > >> So what is the rationale for this restriction? > > I'll let Hixie respond to the question. > >>> When you talk about interop issues, do you mean actual interop >>> issues with software deployed today (even if that software might >>> fade away in the future) or interop issues in a future scenario >>> where every piece of software conforms to the spec? >> >> If there are valid reasons to ignore a particular item, then a MUST >> is not appropriate. > > If you push "valid reasons" hard enough, you can just do > s/MUST/SHOULD/g and then validator UIs can label SHOULD violations as > "errors". Fallacy alert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#The_slippery_slope_as_fallacy That being said, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to substantively answer the questions I have posed to the extent that you can. > You didn't say what sort of interop issues you are concerned about. True. That's because it is putting the cart before the horse a bit. Looking at the current set of errors, I see no coherent pattern. That might be a failing on my part. That might be because there is a lack of order. (You seem to suggest that the policy is: scream loudly enough and you too can get your favorite pet peeve disallowed, that being said, I can point to counter examples, but let's not digress...) Without knowing what problem these errors are trying to solve, I don't feel I can submit bug reports. Interop issues might be one criteria. Might not. I can name other criterias that might or might not work. It might help if I we looked at some real data. I recently did an exercise where I did a quick (and I must stress: quick!) sort of a number of web sites and analyzed the errors produced. I can't imagine any valid reason why one should expect to find a trailing semicolon in an anchor tag despite the fact that it does not cause any interop problems: http://intertwingly.net/stories/2010/03/21/www.sina.com.cn#stray_semicolon I can see valid reasons for one to ignore the requirement that ampersands must be escaped in attribute values that represent a URI: http://intertwingly.net/stories/2010/03/21/www.sina.com.cn#escape My sort may be bogus. People may differ on where to draw the line. But I think that these are the questions that need to be discussed before scores of bugs are filed. - Sam Ruby
Received on Monday, 22 March 2010 14:52:00 UTC