Re: SHORTTAG

At 06:55 PM 09/12/96 +0100, Martin Bryan wrote:

>HTML extends SHORTTAG attribute processing to beyond that of SGML (by saying
>that unknown attribute names and associated values are ignored) for good
>reasons. Attribute entry is one of the areas where users are most prone to
>make typing errors (e.g. mistyped attribute names) or try to take short cuts
>(such as leaving out the literal quotes or just entering a token value).

That does not seem to me a good reason (other than leaving out quotes, which
is not an extension beyond SGML SHORTTAG). If attributes are typo-prone,
that seems a very good reason to *report the error*. A friendly application
also has good reason not to crash or terminate after reporting that error,
but that seems to me rather a different thing than ignoring the error; an
issue of error recovery rather than of syntactic correctness. 

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 18:07:53 UTC