Re: Comments on HTML WG face to face meetings in France Oct 08

On Nov 18, 2008, at 5:18 AM, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>> It sounds like, based on your statements, there would be no  
>> specification or set of specifications that define how Boris's  
>> document should be processed, even if it were syntactically correct  
>> XML. We certainly want to avoid HTML being underspecified in this  
>> way.
>
> Exactly. There SHOULD be specifications that define how HTML 5 MAY  
> be processed for certain use cases. However this is very different  
> from specifying how HTML SHOULD or MUST be processed.

As a browser implementor, I would like a specification, not a serving  
suggestion. In other words, a document that says how an interactive  
HTML user agent (what we commonly call "a browser") MUST process HTML,  
just as router vendors want specs that define how they MUST process IP  
packets, and compiler vendors want specs that define how they MUST  
process C++ source files. Doesn't HTML deserve to be taken just as  
seriously?

(Of course, many of the conformance criteria relevant to mainstream  
browsers won't apply to other kinds of software. Fortunately, HTML5  
defines a number of conformance classes: <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#conformance-requirements 
 >. The classes "data mining tool" and "markup generator" cover  
between them any tool that takes HTML as input or output, and are free  
of browser-specific concerns.)

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 14:42:21 UTC