- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:51:03 -0500
- To: Katie Haritos-Shea <ryladog@earthlink.net>
- CC: wai-xtech@w3.org, "'HTML WG'" <public-html@w3.org>
Katie Haritos-Shea wrote: > People will continue to commit crimes and break the law........but it that a reason not to have them? Depending on how many people there are, possibly yes. If you have a law that no one follows, you have a problem. You can try to enforce it. Even if you assume that you have the resources to enforce it (which is a big if), this leads to a lot of people being unhappy with you. If you happen to be holding a gun to their head (e.g. you're a government), they'll go along for a while. But revolutions do happen. Or you can not enforce it, in which case what's the point of having it? Note that the "no one follows it" condition is a lot more stringent than needed; for real-life laws you get into trouble once several percent of a population (maybe several tens of percent, for some cases) don't bother following the law. Now I agree that having the law on the books might encourage people to change behavior because it's the right thing to do. But even there, things are not clear-cut: c.f. speed limits. Keep in mind that of the many laws on the books in any jurisdiction only a very few are what one would think of as "natural law". Most are social constructs, with the vast majority being something people wouldn't think of offhand if asked to come up with a law code. Really, we don't want the web to end up in the situation of legal systems, where often enough no one can really tell what is legal and what isn't, and going through life without violating multiple statutes with every action is impossible. -Boris
Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 21:51:47 UTC