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Re: [Lynx-dev] A patch for lynx.


From: David Woolley
Subject: Re: [Lynx-dev] A patch for lynx.
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:19:53 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (X11/20070221)

Zephaniah E. Hull wrote:
On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 07:25:42AM +0100, David Woolley wrote:

- aborting the document on the first well formedness error (incidentally
  much of the XML type syntax in web pages would result in this
  behaviour if served in non-compatibiity mode!).

I'd argue that the specification itself is being stupid here.

It's not.  This is fundamental to the meaning of X in XML and XHTML,
i.e. extensible.  The well formedness rules exist so that browsers
can parse extensions to the language correctly without understanding
them.

The real problems here are that XHTML 1.0 isn't really extensible and
that people are using it fashion reasons (the software industry is
very fashion driven and people have been led to believe that new is
always best - it's also good for CVs).

Most people creating presentational web sites should actually be using
HTML 4.01 (if not Acrobat!).  The WHATWG consortium of the mainstream
browser developers are creating an HTML 5, rather than going the
XHTML road, for this reason.


A web browser does not exist to do exact validation of a given standard
or set of standards.

No, but the extensive error recovery has caused the problem that there
is no proper specification of HTML and everyone has to try and reverse
engineer the market leader's behaviour.  But the main reason is that
you cannot know whether the problem is really an extension being
misused.  Note that XML doesn't require validation, only well formedness.


A web browser exists to give the best experience to the user, this is
usually done in this case by following the appropriate standard, but not
always.

I hate the term experience.  It is normally used by marketing people
to refer to making the browser user slave to the author.  Web browsers
should exist to give maximum access to information.  This may be what
you meant, but it is not what authors normally mean by it.

Also, as noted in my other reply, what users tend to want is that all
browsers behave the same, which means bugwise compatibility with the
dominant browser, and achieving that is a major job that even
consortia, like WHATWG, find difficult.





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