[whatwg] Handling <title> inside <body>

Wed Nov 12 11:44:31 PST 2008

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Garrett Smith wrote:
> >>
> >> A script that adds an HTML element to a INPUT element should cause an 
> >> hierarchy exception to be raised.
> >
> > No, it shouldn't.
> 
> DOM 1 seems to disagree with that.

You are misreading DOM1 (the type of a node means text node vs element 
node, not one type of element node vs another), but in any case, DOM1 is 
obsolete now, and browsers uniformly implement a DOM that allows arbitrary 
elements to be nested arbitrarily, and this is what Web DOM Core will 
require too.

> >> | Since user agents may vary in how they handle error conditions,
> >> | authors and users must not rely on specific error recovery behavior.
> >>
> >> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#notes-invalid-docs
> >
> > This was one of the biggest mistakes in HTML4, and HTML5 does not make
> > that mistake again.
> 
> Why?

Not defining error handling is how we ended up with tag soup. It results 
in high barriers to entry for competition in the browser space and leads 
to subtle differences between browsers that causes developer pain and can 
be used (intentionally or not) as a vendor-lockin technique. I recommend 
reading some of the blogs and position papers from early 2004 around when 
the WHATWG was formed. Suffice it to say that from the WHATWG's 
perspective, it is taken as a basic axiom that error handling must be 
defined in detail.

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