Am 26.08.2011 17:28, schrieb Dennis Sosnoski:
Ok, it's true that Postel's principle didn't really lead to the browser wars on the web. The people who were producing content were violating the principle by being sloppy in what they produced, and the browsers had a competition to try to work with the sloppiest HTML. There was a lot of this, at least back in the '90s. People were creating HTML pages with missing required start or end tags, misspelled tags, and so on. The browsers would interpret this malformed HTML in different ways, resulting in web pages that would look fine in one browser (the one the developers of the page had tested on, of course) but not in others. - Dennis
Btw. the browsers are a good example why it is important to be open in what you expect. The problem with standards is that they can be interpreted in different ways. So if two browsers try to implement a standard very strictly they may still produce two slightly incompatible implementations. So it can happen that what A accepts does not work in B and the other way round.
Then people who create web sites would have to create two versions of their site to avoid that the browser does not display the site at all and instead says "This html is invalid". That is why it is good that even todays browsers are quite open in what they accept as input.
Christian -- -- Christian Schneider http://www.liquid-reality.de Open Source Architect Talend Application Integration Division http://www.talend.com
