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

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