[html4all] Interview: HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson discusses features, pain points, adoption rate, and more

[Jason White]

My main difficulty with "silent" error recovery, combined with specifying how
the recovery is to be performed, is that it will create a great incentive for
content authors to design errant documents which fail to conform to the spec,
but which are nonetheless processed predictably by conforming implementations.

This is why I have been largely silent, with occasional exceptions on this
list, about the ALT attribute controversy: even if ALT is a required attribute
of IMG and AREA as in HTML 4.01, if HTML 5 then defines error recovery
requirements applicable to a missing ALT attribute, this is tantamount, for
many practical purposes excluding validation, to not requiring ALT altogether.
Yet, one of the driving ideas of the HTML 5 effort has been precisely to
define and codify error recovery, with which doing so in this kind of case
would be entirely consistent. One can even imagine "validators" designed to
test for documents that won't be parsed or rendered predictably (by graphical
UAs) if the HTML 5 error handling requirements are implemented. Obviously,
this is distinct from testing for conformance to the spec, but I can foresee
my hypothesized lower standard of evaluation as becoming the norm, given the
incentive to write erroneous document instances referred to above. In effect,
the error handling becomes the de facto substitute for whatever the "real"
conformance requirements stated in the spec turn out to be.

"Draconian" is merely a pejorative term brought out by those for whom even XML
well-formedness constraints are too much to swallow.

Conversely, of course, if the treatment of non-conforming documents is
"unspecified" or "implementation-defined", there is more of an advantage to be
won by actually caring about conformance, again for many practical purposes of
interest to content authors; and of course, accessibility, among other
considerations, is likely to loose out even more in this retreat.