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kaled - 11:37 am on Jan 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
You and I might like this idea, but the general public has no interest in it.
The general public has no interest in the W3C, WHATWG, HTML, HTTP, CGI or anything else - all they care about is does it work.
All I'm talking about is a flag in the status bar that indicates a rendering error (HTML or maybe CSS as well) that can be clicked for more information.
The purpose of any web standards organisation is to improve quality and uniformity. The idea that standardizing the handling of HTML errors is a good thing is plainly nuts - the message this sends out to web developers is "It doesn't matter if you write error-strewn code, the browsers will handle your errors in a standardized way, so your errors aren't really errors, they're just an alternative way of doing things."
Any standards organisation with this sort of attitude deserves one thing and one thing only - oblivion.
However, certain "errors" should be ignored for this purpose, for instance there is no point putting alt text on an image used to implement round-corners, etc. Also, other "errors" should be made legal, for instance, placing <noscript> in the <head> should be legal. Indeed, all the silly rules that serve no purpose should be scrapped - and there are enough of those for a new thread.
Standards organisations are not supposed to "go with flow" they are supposed to set the direction of flow - in a sensible direction. However, both HTML and CSS have suffered very badly from having idiots in charge of standards - for instance, why can you not define symbolic constants something like #define myColor = purple in CSS. This would be useful and trivially simple and has doubtless been proposed many times but some dumbo somewhere has said "No, no, no, that would sacrilege for (some pathetic reason)".
Kaled.