Re: stopping discussions on serializations and contributing constructively

On 7/11/07, Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com> wrote:
>
>
> Again, however, no one has expressed anything about guiding authors
> to to prefer XML over text/html. You're misreading these comments.
> Suggestions  have been floated to permit (and not deprecate or
> discourage) authors to use XML-like syntax for the text/html
> serialization.


The suggestion, whether it was written succinctly or not, was to require
HTML to have a stricter syntax, i.e. an XML-like syntax.  While this
wouldn't affect parsing rules, this would affect the validation of
documents.  There are disadvantages and advantages to this.

The main disadvantage, and the deal-breaker for me, is that making a large
percentage of valid documents suddenly invalid won't lead to better code on
the web.  It will lead to more authors that care less about validity
(because their code still works).  We should avoid this.

But the discussion should still be welcome, in some form, somewhere.

I would still like to see, as promised, examples of valid unquoted
attributes that are handled incorrectly in IE and/or Firefox, because that
may be important to the specification itself and to creating useful test
cases for the specification.