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Ignoring errors
Jun. 27th, 2007 09:57 amI've been doing CSS web work for some volunteer work I have been doing. CSS (and many other web languages) all have what is one of my big pet peeves on programming: silently ignoring errors.
If you make a typo, instead of giving an error message, many of the interpreters and parsers for these languages either silently ignore the error, or do the wrong thing. You can use syntax checkers in various editors, or debuggers to get around this, but it drives me nuts that the default behavior is to just ignore mistakes. I guess the thought is to hide errors from non-technical users; but someone who is not skilled in debugging most needs messages to point out their mistakes. IMHO, an error message is far more useful and friendly than just rendering the page wrong, or doing some other wrong thing quietly.
This kind of stuff is like languages that do not require you to declare variables. With such languages, if you make a typo on a variable name, instead of getting a syntax error message you get a runtime error, or even worse, an incorrect result which you may or may not notice.
Error messages are good.
If you make a typo, instead of giving an error message, many of the interpreters and parsers for these languages either silently ignore the error, or do the wrong thing. You can use syntax checkers in various editors, or debuggers to get around this, but it drives me nuts that the default behavior is to just ignore mistakes. I guess the thought is to hide errors from non-technical users; but someone who is not skilled in debugging most needs messages to point out their mistakes. IMHO, an error message is far more useful and friendly than just rendering the page wrong, or doing some other wrong thing quietly.
This kind of stuff is like languages that do not require you to declare variables. With such languages, if you make a typo on a variable name, instead of getting a syntax error message you get a runtime error, or even worse, an incorrect result which you may or may not notice.
Error messages are good.
