RE: [SVGMobile12] Comment: Please give specific error-handling behaviour

But, but, ...

The top priority is to put effort into getting interoperability with 
conformant content. Put the time and effort there. That's hard enough. 
There are a zillion ways content can be unconformant. If we specify 
behavior for each possible non-conformant situation, the spec itself will 
take an infinite amount of time, the test suite twice infinity, and the 
implementation thrice infinity. Well, maybe I exaggerate - I am just trying 
to make a general point about incorrect content when developing a standard. 
I understand that the W3C is moving towards specs which include testable 
assertions, so I guess we will have to accept a certain amount of 
once/twice/thrice infinity. (But only if everyone else at the W3C does 
this, also!)

Regarding this specific case, in the Implementation Notes appendix, the 
SVGt-1.2 spec talks about what an SVG UA should do with invalid values. 
(Borrowed from CSS spec, mainly.) From a spec point of view, it makes sense 
to say that out of range values are either "invalid" (with a hyperlink to 
the section of the spec that says what to do with invalid values) or "in 
error" (with a hyperlink to the section of the spec that says what to do 
when the document is in error). For out of range numeric values, it seems 
like "in error" is more appropriate.

Jon

At 06:31 PM 5/17/2005, Doug Schepers wrote:

>Hi-
>
>I think Ian's comment is well placed. With the proliferation of viewers
>pending, authoring will be a bear unless we shoot for as much consistency as
>possible. Alos, explicit treatment of each case during design is the best
>way to expose possible unforeseen problems.
>
>Regards-
>Doug
>
>doug . schepers  @ vectoreal.com
>www.vectoreal.com ...for scalable solutions.
>
>Ian Hickson wrote:
>|
>| On Tue, 17 May 2005, Jon Ferraiolo wrote:
>| >
>| > For SVG Tiny [1.1 or 1.2], if an integer is outside the "32,767 to
>| > 32,767" range, then that content is non-conformant, and
>| non-conformant
>| > content will generate user-agent-specific behavior.
>|
>| Ugh, user-specific error handling behaviour is the path to a
>| tag soup world like we have for HTML.
>|
>| Please can SVG 1.2 give explicit error handling behaviour for
>| every error case?
>|
>| --
>| Ian Hickson               U+1047E
>| )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>| http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \
>| _\  ;`._ ,.
>| Things that are impossible just take longer.
>| `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2005 03:44:45 UTC