On Mon, 24 Sep 2012, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
It's also not clear to me what the WHATWG HTML Living Standard [1]
really means by "willful violation"
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#willful-violation
Can you elaborate on how the definition you cite there in the spec is
unclear? I'm not sure how to make it clearer.
e.g., is it just an allowance for APIs and browser software to not be
completely strict about processing some input for the sake of backward
compatibility with existing (messy) web content, or is it an active
attempt at redefining core protocols?
The spec seems pretty clear that it's the latter ("conflicting needs have
led to this specification violating the requirements of these other
specifications").
However, it is interesting that the willful violations are not limited
to RFC 3986: the spec also mentions willful violations of RFC 2046, RFC
2616, RFC 2781, RFC 5322, EcmaScript, XPath, XSLT, and Unicode. Quite a
list...
Yeah. Turns out we (the Web standards community) haven't been doing such a
great job of making our specificatiosn match reality. :-(
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'