On 11/30/06, Sam Ruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/30/06, Anne van Kesteren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> It has to allow two authoring syntaxes. One HTML and one XML. I thought we
> were past that discussion?
The sense I am gathering is that the proposal is not obviously insane, and
in fact is a bit novel in that such a narrowly scoped adoption of XML syntax
-- i.e., only to the extent that it both reflects the web as widely
practiced and only to the extent that doing such does not introduce
ambiguity into the grammar -- had not been considered before.
In any case, I plan to proceed on the assumption that it is worth my time to
flesh out the proposal a bit more. The next iteration is likely to also
contain thoughts on extensibility and namespaces. Like this proposal was,
my intent is that that proposal too will also take great care to only be
minimally invasive.
So far, the proposal is to have two syntaxes:
1) HTML5 - Backwards-compatible text/html syntax that allows trailing
slashes on always-empty elements.
2) XHTML5 - Full XML syntax with the proper mime type.
I am not sure where extensibility and namespaces would fit into that.
Perhaps they should be proposed independently of this.
Again, early adopters of CSS, validation, and semantic mark-up were
told a story. That story said that maintainability=>no formatting in
HTML=>CSS=>XHTML=>trailing backslashes on empty elements. That's not
true, but quibbling nets few converts. If we make trailing backslashes
invalid, then every bug report we file will say:
- Remove trailing backslashes. You can't serve XHTML like this.
That will invariably be rejected.
If we keep them valid on always-empty elements, then it'll be much nicer:
- HTML5 is the new hot thing. You shouldn't be serving XHTML as
text/html anyways. Switch doctypes, revalidate, and iteratively
improve markup
It's much easier to gain acceptance, agreement, buy-in, consensus on
the latter. The validation errors they'll see will actually help them
with browser compatibility.
--
Leons Petrazickis
