"The more I find out, the less I know."
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Weather at the Frozen North
This is my personal blog. My professional blog is The Customer Service Survey I've written a book called Gourmet Customer Service. You can buy it on Amazon. (in)Frequently Asked Questions AIM Screen Name: DFNfrozenNorth
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Last Updated: Aug 07, 2008 03:29 PM
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Wednesday - January 14, 2004 at 03:37 AM inWell-Formed XML?
There is apparently a debate going on now about whether browsers should accept badly-formed XML documents . For the non-technical, this basically means if you load a web page, and the page doesn't exactly meet the technical specification for that kind of page, should your browser (a) refuse to display the page, or (b) try to figure out what the page is supposed to be, and display its best guess?
I am boggled that some people might even suggest that (a) is the better choice. Ever since the beginning of the graphical web browser, it has been understood that there will be formatting mistakes, and there's absolutely no point whatsoever in turning a minor mistake into a barrier for people to navigate the web. There are even rules for dealing with HTML errors in a reasonable way (for example, ignore unknown tags; If an element needs to be closed and it isn't, then assume there's a close tag in an appropriate place; etc.). Yes, the jobs of some programmers would be simpler if they could force everything to match the XML specifications perfectly, but guess what? The world is a messy place. Deal with it. Posted at 03:37 AM | Permalink | | | |