On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Tim Bray wrote:
One more data point... I work on Web software all the time and have for
many years; in recent years mostly at the REST (app-to-app HTTP
conversations) rather than browser-wrangling level. I�d have to say
that URI interoperability problems haven�t come near getting into the
list of top-20 pain points. So either my experience is wildly
untypical, or maybe it�s a combination of being a little bit lucky, and
that the pain which exists is highly concentrated in the browser space.
The importance of error handling goes up dramatically as the number of
participants in a space increases. When one is writing private software
where you write the server and the client, one is unlikely to run into any
problems that one would attribute to the specs. When one is writing
software with a few hundred participants, these kinds of errors occur, but
it's trivial to deal with them by telling the offending people to follow
the spec. When one is dealing with trillions of items, it becomes
impossible to fix the problems, and error-handling becomes necessary.
The Web is a classic example of the latter, so browser vendors and authors
of software that interacts with the Web, e.g. Web search engine software
(GoogleBot), Web mirroring software (wget), etc, often run into it.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'