Ian, I think you are making excellent arguments. Yes, it is definitely better for everyone to "reverse-engineer" from a formal spec than from a particular implementation. Jon At 05:42 PM 5/18/2005, Ian Hickson wrote: >On Wed, 18 May 2005, Jon Ferraiolo wrote: > > > > ...if you define error handling too precisely people purposely will > > start creating nonconformant content that purposes is in error so that > > they can treat error handling as a language feature (instead of creating > > conformant content). > >Just to play devil's advocate here, why is that a bad thing? > >And is it better for the user for authors to abuse an error condition but >have that render the same everywhere, or for authors to abuse an error >condition but only have that render the expected way in the market leader? > >The latter is what HTML ended up doing, which is why HTML browser vendors >are bending over backwards to reverse-engineer the market leader's error >handling. This disastrous situation, "tag soup", is one of the things that >the XML world is supposed to save us from. It would be most unfortunate if >the SVG spec was to reintroduce the problem. > >-- >Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL >http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. >Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'Received on Thursday, 19 May 2005 01:13:40 UTC
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