Re: Formal definition of HTML5 (was Re: Version information)

On 4/17/07, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Henrik Dvergsdal wrote:
> >
> > As I indicated earlier: There will always be aspects of programming
> > languages (and programs) that aren't automatically checked.
>
> Yes, but we want these aspects to be as few and far between as possible.
> We want to encourage an ecosystem where conformance checkers compete over
> how many errors they can test for, in the same way that browsers compete
> in how many test cases they pass.
>
> I love the idea of that. Even if there weren't other reasons, that by
itself would be enough to convince me no official schema is needed.
Obviously working from a DTD alone isn't enough to produce a good browser,
so why check only it?

And personally, I don't think there is anything wrong with an English-only
specification. By defining carefully any words used, English can be just as
specific as a machine readable spec, prehaps even more so.