[whatwg] Custom elements and attributes

Lachlan Hunt lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au
Sun Nov 12 06:21:55 PST 2006


Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> At the very least, ISO-8859-1 must be treated as Windows-1252.  I'm 
>> not sure about the other ISO-8859 encodings.  Numeric and hex 
>> character references from 128 to 159 must also be treated as 
>> Windows-1252 code points.
> 
> I understand why you want to do this, but it makes me very nervous. 
> At best , it's a band-aid.

Yes, that's true, but it is reality and it is what browsers must do in 
order to remain compatible with millions of legacy documents.  Keep in 
mind that such requirements would only apply to documents served as 
text/html, not XML.

> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect.html
> 
> Section 4.2 and 4.3 are especially relevant. From 4.3:
> 
> However, the tendency for some agents to attempt silent recovery 
> from such errors is also an error. Silent recovery from error 
> perpetuates what could be easily fixed if the resource owner is 
> simply informed of that error during their own testing of the resource.

Authors who check their pages using a conformance checker would be 
alerted to the error.  A typical browser can't do that (at least not by 
default) because the average user just doesn't care or need to know 
about such errors.

There are already tools available for developers that can alert them to 
such errors.  e.g. The error consoles in Firefox, Opera, Safari, iCab, 
etc. and various validator extensions which report markup, CSS and JS 
errors.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/



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