[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 00:45 +0000 UTC, on 2006-12-05, Ian Hickson wrote:

[...]

	["guesswork"]

> The point is the browsers all do the same thing, and that's well-defined
> and documented [...]
> if all the browsers do Z, then since the author presumably checked
> his page with at least one browser, and it did Z, and he didn't correct Y,
> then the assumption that Z is what Y was supposed to be is IMHO a safe
> one.

OK, agreed. For HTML5 documents that seems a reasonable assumption. (Assuming
the browser indeed is HTML5 compliant.)

I'm still somewhat sceptical about the reality of this though, as it relies
on the author checking the document with at least one HTML5-compliant
browser. This reliance would provide Microsoft an easy attack vector on
HTML5: give away free authoring tools (or even lure people into paying for
them) that produce code that triggers HTML5-compliant browsers to, as per the
HTML5 spec, stop processing the document, and have InternetExplorer present
such documents as if they're fine.

What then? Will every other browser really tell the user that it won't try to
interpret what the author might have meant?


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>