- From: Jon Ferraiolo <jonf@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:11:41 -0800
- To: "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@mit.edu>, "Jim Ley" <jim@jibbering.com>
- Cc: <www-svg@w3.org>
My opinion: * I am all for mandated rules for error handling behavior within specs if it can be specified simply and implemented simply, such as an XML parser bailing if the content is not valid XML. * I am against mandated rules error handling (and instead leave error handling to the UA, as Jim suggests) if the spec and implementation become complex. In other words, if it qualifies as KISS, then mandate interoperable error handling behavior; otherwise, tell content implementers and content developers that error handling is UA dependent. Jon -----Original Message----- From: www-svg-request@w3.org [mailto:www-svg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Boris Zbarsky Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 1:40 PM To: Jim Ley Cc: www-svg@w3.org Subject: Re: SVGT 1.2: Appendix C3: SVG Error Processing 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 Friday, 6 January 2006 00:10:25 UTC