Re: progress on HTML 2.0 reconstruction

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Tue, 28 Mar 95 19:05:30 EST

At 6:32 PM 3/28/95, Joe English wrote:
>Couldn't this section just be removed?
>
>As I understand it, it only describes the
>recommended behaviour for browsers upon
>encountering invalid documents. Any smart
>browser implementor should be able to figure
>this out on their own.
>
>The presence of this section in the specification
>is widely interpreted by users as offering carte blanche
>to invent whatever new tags and attributes they feel like.
>
>How about: "In the case of an unknown tag, the
>results are undefined." That better reflects
>the true situation -- some browsers are known to do
>strange things with unknown tags, like making
>the content blink or centering it.
>
>Does the specification *really* need to say anything
>about what to do with illegal documents?

I'm not sure I like the ways this has been abused, but I'd like the random
implementations that might result without it even less.

It also serves as advice on what to do with unimplement features and gives
us a little flexiblity in developing/upgrading to new versions of HTML.

"Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept." still
seems like good advice to me.

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu