Re: Browsers and syntax errors (Was: Captions for Figures...)

>>>>> pmcohen@netaxs.com (Paul Cohen) writes:

>> Making browsers forgiving about HTML syntax errors, instead of giving
>> good user feedback, is probably the gravest error committed by the
>> browser writers.

> As a programmer, I have to disagree strongly.  The most important thing a
> program can be is forgiving of user errors.

Does that hold for programming language compilers as well? Does that
hold for UNIX shell scripts or, if fact, any formal textual way of
specifying to a computer what you want it to do?

You shouldn't need a lot of heuristics to figure out what the user has
meant when you're talking about something that amounts to a
"programming language". A document is either correct, or it isn't. And
if it isn't correct, the fix is very often easy... *If* the author is
given some form of feedback, and pointed to the approximate place of
the error in the document.

- Steinar

Received on Monday, 13 March 1995 03:26:03 UTC