- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: 31 May 2002 19:43:08 -0400
- To: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 18:56, Keith Moore wrote: > not useless - they do serve as a specification that implementors > at least consider attempting to adhere to - but this prevents neither > bugs nor proprietary extensions nor failure to implement new features > in a timely fashion. Sure, but we've got ALL of those problems right now, and in spades. Perhaps uselessness is in the eye of the beholder? > otoh, a requirement in the specifications to change functionality in > a way which causes more pain to users (e.g. forbidding browser > interpretation of improperly-labelled content) is highly likely > to be ignored. I have to disagree. Those kinds of "pain to users" rules are in fact standard practice for XML work pretty much across the board. (RSS is about the only place I can think of where HTML-style looseness is even occasionally permitted.) They make it very clear where things are going wrong in a given communications process. When recipient software howls (and I don't mean sending a polite message that has no effect on the transaction), senders listen. Maybe it's too late for text/html, but perhaps the transition to application/xhtml+xml is an opportunity to make clear that solid Web architecture can only be built on trustworthy foundations. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
Received on Friday, 31 May 2002 19:37:59 UTC