- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:29:27 -0800
- To: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Boris Zbarsky wrote: > It's just a PI, then something that starts out looking like XML but has > a mismatched close tag. The XML specification doesn't preclude > construction of a DOM out of this text, and some XML consumers do just > that. Others treat the mismatched close tag as a fatal error and do not > produce a DOM. The inconsistency is a problem. > Actually there's a lot more inconsistency than that. The XML specification doesn't require anything in particular, even if the close tag were present. The assumption that DOM is what you want or will get is a big leap. I would say the XML specification does require the error to be reported to the user, though perhaps a partial syntax tree of some kind could be constructed from this. But again, exactly how this is handled is up to the consuming application, not the document producer. Beyond error handling, a big concern I have with HTML 5 as written is that it mixes together multiple layers that should be separate. The object model by which one accesses a document is very different from the syntax of the document, the semantics of the document, and the display of the document in a particular medium. HTML 5 treats these as more or less different views of the same thing rather than as separable, independent pieces that connect to but do not depend on each other. A monolithic design like this is far less flexible and extensible. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Refactoring HTML Just Published! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 03:30:06 UTC