Re: new TAG issue TagSoupIntegration-54

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 22:17 +0100, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
[...]
> Is the indefinite persistence of 'tag soup' HTML* consistent with a
> sound architecture for the Web?
[...]

That description is good enough for me...

> [...] I'd much prefer to see discussion
> about the architectural issue itself. . .

The following is a particularly interesting scenario, I think.
It shows we need to look at the macro interactions as well
as the micro interactions.

Forwarded with permission...


On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 01:06 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
[...] 
> The second, and more important reason, is illustrated by this scenario:
> 
>   Alice writes a document that uses the new feature. It is handled as tag 
>   soup in legacy UAs, and is handled according to XML rules in new UAs. 
>   Everything is fine.
> 
>   Bob, who only has a legacy UA, edits the document. The document seems to 
>   work fine to Bob, because in his legacy UA it is handled according to 
>   tag soup error handling rules.
> 
>   Alice, using her new UA, tries to access the document. However, 
>   unbeknownst to Bob, he introduced a well-formedness error. Alice's 
>   browser is therefore required, according to XML rules, to show an error 
>   message.
> 
>   Alice complains to her UA vendor.
> 
>   This happens many thousands of times with different people.
> 
>   The UA vendor stops using an XML processor, because otherwise he will 
>   lose his market share.
> 
> This isn't hypothetical; it is the situation we are in today with XHTML 
> documents sent as text/html. UAs cannot use XML parsers to parse these 
> XHTML-sent-as-text/html documents, even if they could find a way to detect 
> them, because a huge fraction of such documents are ill-formed and would 
> thus render *worse* in new UAs than in legacy UAs.
> 
> Users won't upgrade to a browser if it renders documents worse.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Wednesday, 25 October 2006 19:52:11 UTC