- From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:56:23 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org
Philip & Le Khanh wrote: > for all browsers to handle something that /alleges/ to be HTML5 > consistently if the document is defective (poorly formed). Indeed, > if browsers /do/ vary wildly in their treatment of ill-formed > HTML5 documents, there will be far greater pressure on /hoi polloi/ Unfortunately, that is not how the market really works. What really happens is that one vendor becomes, at least temporarily, dominant. Users then start complaining to the other vendors that their browsers are broken because they don't handle input correctly when the author thinks it is valid, even though it is really invalid. Vendors are then forced to reverse engineer the dominant product, and imitate its behaviour. If you actually reject a construct, users will consider it a false positive. The result has been that, if you look at www-style or www-svg, it is clear that all the vendors want there to be no input that is either rejected or produces undefined results. "HTML5" would have value to user agent developers if all it did was to document real life HTML. However, this knowledge is, at best, not helpful to authors and, sometimes, dangerous knowledge. Moreover, at the same time, it is extending HTML to compete with ASP.NET and XFORMS and with Flash and SVG.
Received on Saturday, 28 April 2007 13:56:41 UTC