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On 16/12/2010 09:37, David Carlisle wrote: > On 16/12/2010 08:15, rjelliffe wrote: >> So is that IMDB behaviour being adopted by HTML5, too? > > yes This is really scary. One guy makes a spelling mistake in his HTML and the rest of us pay the price, just because his site is popular. This can't be a sane way forward. Back in about 1998, I was piggy-in-the-middle in a quarrel between a big bank and Microsoft. Microsoft's first XML parser allowed </> as an end tag, and the bank wrote a system that relied on this. Then W3C decided not to allow this, Microsoft changed their parser accordingly, and the bank was threatening to sue them for the costs incurred by a 2-month delay to their systems going live, which they reckoned was about $1bn. Fortunately for everyone, Microsoft didn't budge, and the bank were persuaded that by using unratified standards they had been taking a risk and had to accept the consequences. Bending the standard because of a mistake made by one user, however important they are, is surely increasing the lifetime cost to the community rather than decreasing it. It feels like a bad decision. Michael Kay Saxonica
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