Re: SVG crosswordplayer first release!!

"Chris Lilley" <chris@w3.org>
> JL> Sure, but requiring that all legacy content need be upgraded so the
legacy
> JL> content can be accessed on the new viewers is a very bad idea, the new
> JL> viewers will be seen to be at fault not the content.
>
> No, the reverse. If there is no message then the viewers that don't
> implement old broken stuff are seen to be at fault. If there is a
> message then its clear which content is broken.

I don't buy that, I've seen lots of people moan like mad when browsers have
switched to standard behaviour from non-standard, a lot of people don't
care, they need something that works.  This is why RFC 2854 tells authors of
UA's that they have to bugwards compatible with other UA's.    We can't
break legacy content, we can only build something better that authors will
want to author to.

> Remember this isn't 'legacy' as in 'it was previously a standard' but
> legacy as in 'nonstandard, proprietary extensions, relying on bugs in
> a particular viewer'.

bugs?  onkeydown was hardly a bug, it's simply a problem of DOM events not
being ready - it was even in the drafts wasn't it - so to get SVG 1.0 out,
implementation experience was solicited, people had to implement it, we
shouldn't penalise people for doing that.

> And without an error message, yes, new viewers will be seen to be at
> fault. So they will be under pressure to reverse engineer bugs etc and
> the format gets defined by reverse engineering and impenetrable
> hueristics, not by the spec.

but with an error message, we have no reason to upgrade as our content we
are used to accessing no longer works - that's much more important than new
features, we won't know about those until after we've upgraded, and if we
never do.   This is quite apart from the systems that use an embedded viewer
to display content - having legacy ones of these break will be unacceptable
so the UA authors will not include it, they'll lose their customers.

> hence the sorry state of html browsers today that have not
> improved significantly in three or four years.

Well you know I'd say that there's been no reason to improve, there's been
no new mark-up language features, and XHTML is still broken.  What
improvement did you expect from HTML UA's?

Jim.

Received on Sunday, 7 December 2003 08:46:37 UTC