Parsing everything

Tex Texin wrote to <mailto:www-international@w3.org>, 
<mailto:w3c-css-wg@w3.org>, <mailto:w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org>, and 
<mailto:www-style@w3.org> on 5 December 2003 in "Re: UTF-8 signature / 
BOM in CSS" (<mid:3FD1453D.3252B143@i18nguy.com>):

> I would be happy for either the brain-altering meds

   http://www.fluoxetine.com/
   http://www.abilify.com/

Cheers. (And goodbye, refractory depression!)

> or some justification.

I won't repeat Ian Hickson's arguments or ask him to do so. The 
discussion is archived. What I consider Ian's salient points are in the 
following messages.

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Mar/0028.html
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Feb/0199.html
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Feb/0254.html
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Feb/0278.html

In summary:

Junk happens. Declaring it unparsable does not eliminate it and 
probably won't significantly reduce it.

If we don't specify the error handling for every case, agents will vary 
in their error handling, leaving authors with headaches and questions. 
The closest thing to uniformity will be the reverse engineering of the 
market leader's behavior.

Even when a wayward author or agent has created and published junk, 
something is intended by it. Rejecting the junk altogether deprives the 
reader/consumer of what could be at least partial interpretation.

-- 
Etan Wexler.
"Meow": me, ow.

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2003 22:07:16 UTC