[Bug 13410] XML serialisation incompletely defined.

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13410

--- Comment #6 from David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> 2011-08-18 08:44:47 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> Isn't this just XML's problem? Why would we need to redefine the XML spec here?
> I don't understand the problem. What is the interoperability risk here?


XML doesn't define an algorithm for serialising a DOM tree.
You could just say that the "xml fragment serialisation" as referred to by the
html spec meant "any string which would parse to the same tree given an XML
parser" but then subsequent processing needs to be defined to be tolerant to
the implementation-specific differences that that generates. As Anne just
mentioned there are choices about whether to use xml declarations, whether to
use foo/> or foo></foo> whether to use &gt; or > etc etc. If it woul dbe
sufficient to define the xml serialisation in this way one would expect that it
would be sufficient to define the html serialisation the same way: any string
which parses to the same dom using the html parse algorithm. However that is
not the way the html serialisation is defined, one particular serialisation is
defined (which seems like a good thing to me from an interop point of view)

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Received on Thursday, 18 August 2011 08:44:48 UTC