Quoting White Lynx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
So WHATWG doesn't really care about DTDs. (There are two people
involved with that though for validating.)
This is important issue, because requirement to keep DTD accurate
imposes certain
constraints on markup (for example DTD fails to catch errors like
<a href="#top"><span><a href="#bottom">link</a></span></a>)
therefore it is better to know in advance whether normative DTD is required
or not (Relax NG could be more suitable as it admits more accurate
content models then DTD).
It's not. You do need to know how to write it though...
What's needed for a specification is error handling, how it
interoperates with existing
HTML, etc.
All efforts will be made to keep markup clean and consistent, to
avoid conflicts between
presentational HTML elements and math oriented elements and to
specify allowed nesting of elements properly.
You need to specify what happens when people don't do it "properly."
Besides designing the actual language, that's probably the hardest bit.
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
