- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:16:08 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Cc: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, www-html@w3.org
On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Jim Jewett wrote: > > > > Why does the size of the spec matter? > > Because more complicated specs lead to more bugs. Actually it seems that shorter (vaguer) specs (like CSS2) lead to more bugs than more detailed, precise specs (like CSS2.1). > > Surely the benefit to authors far, far outweigh the benefits to the > > spec community? > > Not in this case. > > I see some value (at least for future authors) in a simpler language > specification. I see very little value in many of the optionally > omitted tags. I see great value in allowing for certain tags to be omitted. It makes the language far easier to write. > Are there really very many documents which leave out the body tag, but > are otherwise valid? I don't have that data. It's hard to draw any conclusions from valid documents, though, since are so few of them. > My point is that it really isn't that important whether a comment is at > the very end of the body, or immediately after the body -- and it so it > isn't worth a special exception in the element definition. I disagree, but I suppose it is a matter of opinion. > Since browsers are already doing error correction on 95%+ of pages > anyhow, that doesn't even need to affect the way pages are viewed. It > just simplifies the model of what it takes to be valid. It just means that there would be more errors for authors to worry about. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 02:16:44 UTC