Re: XHTML 2.0 User Agent Conformance

> error or fails to render the document - I've done nothing wrong, and there
> is nothing I can do to fix it, but my clients and customers get a bad
> impression of me.

Actually, the main reason that browsers go out of their way to silently
fix errors is that it is the browser, not the document author, that gets
blamed, because the more tolerant browser is quoted as a reference that
the page is "valid", putting market pressure on the browser developers to
tolerate everything that their competition tolerates.  (On these lists,
we have heard recently that Microsoft is moving away from this, except
for supporting very high profile broken sites - the scope of quirks
mode is reducing at every bug fix - that may be because they have an
effective monopoly.)

> What happens with an errata which fixes an error in the original XHTML 2.0
> specification, UA's pre-Errata would handle a document different from UA's

The errata would have to be against XML itself, as browsers are not
required to read the DTD or validate against it, and there is a strong
lobby that says that browsers should not even have internal knowledge
of the DTD.

Received on Saturday, 1 November 2003 05:19:05 UTC