WHATWG Weekly: Quirks Mode and Error Recovery for XML
Quirks Mode has its first public draft and a group working on XML Error Recovery just started. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Simon Pieters published a first draft of the Quirks Mode Standard. This should help align implementations of quirks mode and reduce the overall number of quirks implementations currently have. In other words, making the quirks that are needed for compatibility with legacy content more interoperable.
In a message to the W3C TAG Jeni Tennison introduced the XML Error Recovery Community Group whose charter is about creating a newish version of XML 1.0 that is fault tolerant. Community Groups are open for everyone to join, so if you want to help out, you can!
That is all, be sure to keep an eye on the HTML5 Tracker for recent changes to HTML!
Wow XML error recovery, and only a decade too late. Perhaps someday, in the distant future, when Microsoft implements the finished spec in IE 17, and after IE 6 through 16 usage dies out (IE will be on 27 by then), my great great great grandchildren will be able to justify writiing XML webpages to their employers.
Well, I’d suggest XML error recovery be made optional anyway. Some may want to turn it off anyway for defense in depth against XSS.
Indeed good news. As mentioned, these have been a long time coming – better late than never. Also agree, part of the appeal of the XML well-formedness check is to allow a developer to assert that their code is expected to be well-formed, and if it isn’t, something went wrong, so fail loudly. Even deterministic error recovery doesn’t address situations where it’s desirable to minimize the possibility of ambiguity resulting in anything other than what was actually intended.
Still, this is an important step towards making XML-flavored HTML and things that might depend on it in the future possible in the long term. Maybe include some implementation advice which suggests that interactive UAs inform the user of what’s up and ask if they want to attempt recovery, like Opera does, except using this method instead of treating it as HTML. I’m not sure the best way to handle that.
I think all communities are 100% for error recovery at the endpoints hence the new community group.
btw your great great great grandchildren should be able to parse and read any well formed xml that you wrote today which may encourage them to write more.