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

On Wed, 18 May 2005, David Woolley wrote:
> > 
> > Ugh, user-specific error handling behaviour is the path to a tag soup 
> > world like we have for HTML.
> 
> Effectively, fully specified error behaviour ceases to be error 
> behaviour and becomes part of the normal behaviour as far as people 
> trying to get the most out of the language (or for text media, trying to 
> defeat spam filters) are concerned.

The same applies to the de-facto error handling behaviour you get when you 
don't define error handling, except that the vendors have to 
reverse-engineer each other to work out how to implement it (exhibit A: 
Web browsers and HTML).

At least if we define the error handling the UAs can all refer to a spec 
to implement it.


> The only specified error behaviours that won't have this effect tend to 
> be unacceptable to browser writers because they shame the content 
> authors (e.g. completely suppressing display of the whole document, or 
> large unmistakable BROKEN SVG banners).

Which is what SVG 1.1 required, although as far as I can tell nobody 
implemented it (certainly Adobe didn't) which resulted in everyone having 
to ignore it as well since a lot of the content out there is broken since 
none of the authors were told about the problems.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'