Chris Wilson wrote You, me and the W3C (aka Reinventing HTML). I don’t have as much to say as him, but I’d like to stress that defined error handling is very important. We have issues with it all the time. I do think Chris Wilson would be a good chair (for the two times I met him briefly) and it will be interesting to see how this new W3C HTML WG will operate.
Absolutely, and where the entire XHTML and HTML ship is finally heading for, too ...
Chris also writes:
We (MSFT) can't change error-handling at ALL, because we're locked into compat.
and that really worries me. Basically holding on so fiercely to backwards compatibility with propriety and obsolete implementations effectively means that IE cannot ever become truly standards-compliant. I really don't understand their false fear of 'breaking the web' when it comes to pages that were broken to begin with...