Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
I have a hard time following you. Could you rephrase what pain it would solve, and why this is the best solution, if the HTML specification in- cludes documentation what you need in terms of explicit interaction with the document layer to produce a functional graphical web browser, except those things that cannot be included for some reason; and giving vendors of said applications a well-defined target? I can honestly think of no pain that would be solved by having the "HTML specification" recommend that certain types of web browsers implement the GIF image format.
The pain of having things that "everyone knows" are needed to make a useful HTML reading device but are not documented as such. A specification is documentation both of the language and what needs to be done to implement a UA to read it and I see no reason to arbitarily limit the scope to those parts that can be expressed in pure markup. As I mentioned there is also the problem of vendors punting on supporting parts of formats that everyone else supports. SHOULD requirements in HTML provide a little extra leverage when reporting these deficiencies as bugs.
In the case of image formats it's probably not overwhelmingly important (only because "everyone knows" what is needed; in the case of audio and video I think it is very important) but I can't see how it's harmful in the way you suggest.
In any case this discussion is probably not very useful. -- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
