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

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
> For instance, in data mining, "Applications and tools that process HTML 
> and XHTML documents for reasons other than to either render the 
> documents or check them for conformance should act in accordance to the 
> semantics of the documents that they process."
> 
> This statement indicates an underlying belief that semantics are 
> interoperable and that a document can in fact be said to have a 
> particular set of semantics which can be shared and transferred between 
> independent parties.
> 
> Of course, I expect most data mining tools to more or less ignore this 
> statement and infer whatever set of semantics they need from the syntax.

If a data mining tool is trying to make a list of headers in a set of 
documents, and it does so in a way that treats <samp> elements as headers 
and <h1> elements as not headers, then it is non-conforming.

I don't see any thing wrong with that. If the spec allowed such behavior I 
would say that was an error in the spec.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 20:52:46 UTC