Re: HTML is a declarative mark-up language

On Jan 29, 2009, at 03:47, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> On Jan 28, 2009, at 2:11 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>>>
>>> HTML is a declarative mark-up language, first and foremost, and  
>>> should
>>> be defined as such even if the behavioral aspects triggered by  
>>> rendering
>>> cause the DOM to be modified on the fly.  There is considerable  
>>> value in
>>> defining what is valid HTML for both what-goes-over-the-wire and  
>>> what
>>> gets rendered on a browser.
>>
>> You've said this before, but you never replied to the last e-mail I  
>> sent
>> on the thread trying to work out what made you believe this:
>>
>>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Nov/0420.html
>
> I didn't reply to it because there seemed no point.  You say that it
> doesn't require DOM, CSS, or scripting, yet the entire spec is
> defined in terms of the effect on DOM, the impact of CSS, and the
> behavior of scripting.  If you try to read the spec from the  
> perspective
> of someone whose implementation does not have a DOM, for whom CSS
> is an entirely orthogonal concept because there is no rendering or
> presentation being implemented, and for which scripting is irrelevant,
> then I think you will discover that HTML5 as currently drafted doesn't
> even define the base mark-up.  That is not an unusual perspective.

I have tried this, and what I discovered was different from what you  
say you think one would discover.

I develop an HTML5 consumer that doesn't have a DOM (or any other tree  
data structure for representing the document tree), doesn't have a  
style system (CSS or other) and doesn't run scripts. The consumer I  
develop is an HTML5 validator and, as such, has everything to do with  
"base markup". Yet, I'm quite able to extract the information I need  
from the HTML 5 spec.

Please note that consumers that don't run <script>s need to implement  
the operational requirements defined in terms of the DOM in a black  
box-equivalent way. They aren't required to add an actual DOM.

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

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 08:05:58 UTC