Subj : Re: XML declaration broken going from Mozilla 1.8a6 to 1.8b
To   : ant
From : Brendan Eich
Date : Sun Mar 13 2005 08:51 am

ant wrote:

> Seeing as the spec is unclear and Rhino can deal with this fine
> couldn't Spidermonkey be fixed to do a fiddle like this for me?


The spec is not unclear, as I said in the message to which you are 
replying.  Intentions of spec authors are never clear, but that's why we 
have specs -- to say what outputs you should get for certain inputs. 
Human intentions are great, but hard to spec completely so as to lead to 
interoperable implementations.

Hacking to match one implementation is what IE did to beat Netscape, and 
what we do (selectively, not across the board) to regain market from IE 
now.  Too much of this makes a mess that serves no one's interests.  It 
would be much better to fix the spec first, then change code.  I am 
trying to do that right now, with ECMA TG1.

/be

.