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. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'