- From: Dave J Woolley <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 19:11:48 +0100
- To: w3-html <www-html@w3.org>
> From: Marcelo Perrone [SMTP:mclist@terra.com.br] > > could you guys help me out pointing reasons why an HTML must be done > correctly even if when its not, the browsers display it correctly. > [DJW:] The most basic reason is that user agent error recovery behaviour is not specified, and is generally not documented. There is commercial pressure to behave consistently on broken input with the market leaders, but developers of smaller tools (like html2ps) cannot afford the time to do this. Future developments may make even the market leaders less tolerant. E.g. it is difficult to create a sensible document object model when elements overlap. The most frequently encountered case of error recovery differences is the way that Netscape 4 requires tables to be explicitly closed before they will display at all, but IE infers the closing tag. There is a prinicipal fairly deep in the origins of the internet that one should be correct in what one produces but tolerant in what one accepts. (XML doesn't really hold to this, though.) -- --------------------------- DISCLAIMER --------------------------------- Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS. >
Received on Thursday, 26 October 2000 14:11:48 UTC