intertwingly

It’s just data

Cataloging Venial Sins


<jgraham> rubys: So do you agree with the position that, in the face of a specification with defined error handling, there should be no MUST-level document conformance critera?

Rob Sayre noticed a related issue.  Browsers are motivated to display something for every response they get, and HTML 5 endeavors to make all browsers consistent in their behavior.

For the moment, let’s ignore Gödel and let’s ignore bugs and lets look at some specific cases.

If every conforming implementation of HTML5 processed documents which start with a UTF-32 LE BOM followed by a WIN-1252 encoded document identically (i.e., there are ZERO interop differences), does it make sense to call such documents non-conforming in an RFC 2119 sense of the word?  A less dramatic example would be a date with a value of mañana.

On the other hand, declaring such documents as conformant would be completely counter-productive.

And then there is the truly sublime.

Perhaps an argument could still be made that <font> SHOULD NOT be used, but that case is weakened significantly by allowing style attributes.