XHTML 2.0 User Agent Conformance

Hi,
  Due to the huge problem of authors marking up pages with invalid 
(X)HTML in the past, because of the attitude: 'if it displays well, I've 
written it well', I think it would be wise to state in the conformance 
section of XHTML2 that user agents must process a page as strictly as a 
general XML document.
  ie. displaying an error message if the markup is invalid, rather than 
doing a 'best guess' render of the page, or at the very least, place a 
prominent error message above the rendered page.

  I believe this would start to make authors who wish to start taking 
advantage of XHTML2, also take notice of and conform to the 
specifications.  Also, it might start making browser vendors ensure that 
they, themselves, conform to the specs, as so many are guilty of not 
doing in the past.

  IMO it would also be wise if user agents, when processing previous 
versions of (X)HTML, displayed an error (above/below the page content) 
if any of the *new XHTML2* elements/attributes were encountered (yet 
still doing a 'best guess' render as is currently done).  This would 
help to solve to problem of many authors mix'n'match tendencies.  Though 
care would need to be taken with vendors doing this, as I'm sure there 
would be a lot of issues encountered with such a drastic change.

What do you think?

CYA
...Lachy

Received on Thursday, 30 October 2003 23:14:27 UTC