Re: mixed signals on "Writing HTML documents", tutorial, etc.

On Jun 19, 2007, at 00:21, Philip & Le Khanh wrote:

> The whole business of the <!DOCTYPE ...> directive I find
> very worrying : I confidently assume that we will continue to
> rely on Validator.W3.Org to check the conformity of our
> HTML documents,

In that case, validator.w3.org will need a software upgrade. It is  
totally unreasonable to expect an SGML validator to be suitable for  
HTML5 conformance checking.

> but how is the validator to know against
> which DOCTYPE to validate if all that is written is
>
> 	<!DOCTYPE html>

If the validator (with upgraded software) sees that doctype, it can  
dispatch to an HTML5 mode.

> ?  If HTML 5 launches a pre-emptive strike on
>
> 	<!DOCTYPE html>
>
> how is an HTML 6 document going to identify itself ?

Either HTML 6 will be compatible so that it doesn't need to tell  
itself apart from HTML5. If the people who define HTML 6 in the  
future don't have the good sense to make their spec compatible,  
surely we can trust them to have the good sense to introduce a  
version discriminator then.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 07:21:03 UTC