[whatwg] Thesis draft about HTML5 conformance checking

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, olivier Thereaux wrote:
> 
> If lightweigh browsers [on mobile devices] with less tolerance of tag 
> soup carry more weight

I don't know why you think that browsers on mobile phones have less 
tolerance of tag soup. All the testing I have seen shows that they support 
tag soup as much as the desktop browsers. In fact the only browsers that I 
am aware of that actually has stricter (XML) parsing on mobile phones is 
Opera, running the same core engine as the desktop Opera browser.

(See, e.g., http://simon.html5.org/articles/mobile-results but note the 
paragaph at the bottom of http://simon.html5.org/test/mobile/ which points 
out that the only "pass" line for a non-Opera browser is in fact a false 
positive, that browser in fact having even more tolerant parsing and even 
less support for the relevant standards.)


> All considered, of course I understand your point that desktop browsers 
> *today* have a considerable influence in defining the state of the art 
> of the web. But any standardization work, or study of the web, made 
> under the assumption that other classes of product only have a minor 
> importance because for the most part they follow this current balance of 
> power and mimick the desktop browsers, is IMHO missing a good chunk of 
> the "big picture".

Given that I work for a company that authors content by hand, provides a 
template-based Web authoring tool, runs a search engine, contributes to a 
browser's development, and is working on mobile device software, I assure 
you that I agree that all of these things should be considered (and, in 
the WHATWG context, are). My original point, which I still believe is 
true, is that the details of the _parsing model_ of search engines is not 
important. That is what is relevant in the context of Henri's thesis.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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