Re: Cleaning House

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> Hi Julian,
> 
> On May 3, 2007, at 12:22 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> I do understand why a specification for HTML5 parsing needs to specify 
>> that. However, a spec for HTML5 authors shouldn't even mention these 
>> special case in parsing rules: all I need to know is what tags are 
>> allowed where, and whether I need (or am allowed) to close them. In 
>> particular, producers of HTML5 documents shouldn't need to read about 
>> how broken documents are processed; they are expected to produce 
>> correct ones, right?
>>
>> So: in favor of splitting the spec (language spec / parser spec).
> 
> How would you feel about a single normative spec with the full set of 
> conformance requirements for both authors and UAs, plus additional 
> material specifically for authors which only talks about conforming 
> content? For example, a tutorial/primer, a quick reference guide, and a 
> slightly more advanced authoring guide that explains the conformance 
> rules for documents.

That would be better than what there is now, but I really think that 
having a normative spec that *only* defines conforming documents would 
be better (note that this doesn't mean that both specs can not be 
generated from the same source).

Speaking of which, I'm not really sure why the UA parsing requirements 
with respect to processing invalid content need to be normative at all. 
As far as I can tell, there's really no need to make them normative.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 20:50:29 UTC