Re: XHTML 2.0 User Agent Conformance

Le vendredi, 31 oct 2003, à 06:03 America/Montreal, Jim Ley a écrit :
>>   ie. displaying an error message if the markup is invalid,
>
> This is a very bad idea, users do not need to be shown the mechanics,
> they're interested in getting the content.

half agreed  with Jim. Most of the users don't have to be warned about 
errors in XHTML content. That said, we may come with two "subjective" 
options.

	1. User agents show a kind of quality icon. When the document is 
conformant to the rules edicted by the spec. A small icon with words 
good document or bad document can be displayed. It's completely 
subjective because you can't verify that the semantics has been 
respected, but it is still a criteria to encourage authors to produce 
good code.

	2. A developer mode in user agents, it's something I wish for a long 
time. If you put the user agent in dev mode, it will be stricter for 
the rendering and will display error messages or greyish page, or not 
display at all. The strategy has to be defined to help the developer. 
So the developer as an additional possibility of verifying if he/she 
has produced good content (valid), still not necessary semantics. It's 
again an incentive and not a burden.




> User Agents have bugs, if a UA has a bug which leads it to think my 
> valid document is invalid and displays 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.

false positive or false negative are always a problem in the society 
but still cases to treat. They lead to interesting issues. The problem 
of being hard to achieve is not an excuse in most cases in the society, 
and it's finally not so hard in the end.



> 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 post-Errata, this would almost certainly not be sustainable.

It's happening all the time in the society as well. Sometimes, laws 
change and you have to update, it doesn't mean that because an errata 
will come out on the speed limit, and so all the signs have to be 
changed on the road, that you must not do it.


--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Friday, 31 October 2003 08:18:15 UTC