- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 15:40:25 -0600
- To: Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com>
- CC: www-svg@w3.org
Jim Ley wrote: > Just define what an error is, and leave the rest to the UA. Vote for less > work! For whom? The spec authors? Or the UA implementors and content authors? Well-specified error behavior (even something as simple as XML's "this is a fatal error, drop everything on the floor and stop" behavior) leads to significantly less work for UA implementors and (in the long run) content authors. Of course it _is_ more work for the authors of the specification in some cases, especially if the desired error-handling is complicated. As a simple example, the ratio of time spent on HTML parsing vs time spent on XML parsing in Gecko development right now is probably about 10:1. Largely because with XML parsing issues simply don't arise; you just follow the spec, and as soon as content doesn't you bail. No complex error-recovery behavior to reverse-engineer. The XML parser is definitely a lot less work for this particular set of UA implementors, even though the HTML parser is older and more mature. -Boris
Received on Thursday, 5 January 2006 21:40:45 UTC