[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:27:14 +0600, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> ...in new browsers, then it looks worse in new browsers than old 
> >>> ones. Thus, new browsers will want to go back to the way that old 
> >>> browsers handled it, so that they don't handle it worse than the 
> >>> (old) competition.
> >>
> >> [...] if the <new-feature> is completely new, such as the proposed 
> >> <xmldata>, then the only documents containing <new-feature> would be 
> >> those that target the new browsers which support it.
> >
> > You assume that documents targetted at new browsers will not be seen 
> > in old browsers. This isn't the case (if it was, we wouldn't have 
> > people trying to send XHTML to HTML UAs).
> 
> No, I don't.

Ok. It sounded like you were.


> They will, and old browsers will show either fallback content, if 
> provided, or nothing at all in place of the <new-feature>. I don't see 
> how is this rendering "better" than showing an error message for 
> malformed <new-feature> content.

Based on my experience, nothing at all is better than an error message in 
so far as what users think. Nothing at all, they ignore. An error message, 
they say "why is the browser broken? My old browser wasn't broken. I'm 
going back to my old browser".

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'