- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:19:54 -0800
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, Dean Edridge <dean@dean.org.nz>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > Since the HTML5 spec itself says the opposite (that some byte streams > are conforming HTML documents and some are not), I think it is a stretch > to say it makes any byte stream legal. Yes, but since it defines exact behavior and DOM construction for absolutely any byte stream, I find that language disingenuous. The reality is that all byte streams can be unambiguously decoded to specific DOMs (or at least that's what the spec is attempting. There may well be cases they've missed.) > Let's compare with a well-known semantic language, English. Many > utterances in English contain syntax errors. Many such utterances will > still be understood correctly by a native speaker, and indeed the > listener will not bother to flag the error most of the time. But that > does not mean that all utterances are correct English. > Yes, but many utterances won't. I challenge any English speaker to find meaning in "sakj eajkk 3q328i9 sajkd", yet an HTML 5 parser would unambiguously construct a document out of that string. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Refactoring HTML Just Published! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 15:20:34 UTC