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Maybe tolerance to legacy pages is part of the problem?

Maybe tolerance to legacy pages is part of the problem?

Posted Oct 21, 2004 6:53 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: How to kill a web browser by mmarkov
Parent article: How to kill a web browser

It would certainly be trivial to weed out these really malformed pages if you simply parsed them strictly according to the HTML spec and rejected all pages that do not pass, but in practice users expect browsers to also render many syntactically incorrect pages, otherwise a large chunk of the web would be unviewable.

I suspect attempts to implement fuzzy parsing that tolerates slightly broken pages is partly to blame here (but of course that is no excuse for buffer overflow errors).


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Maybe tolerance to legacy pages is part of the problem?

Posted Oct 21, 2004 10:44 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

in practice users expect browsers to also render many syntactically incorrect pages

Not to mention that some of us like the feature that a browser starts to display the page even when it hasn't fully download it yet.

Bye,NAR

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