ISSUE-54: <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM "about:legacy-compat">

Per the meeting earlier today, I looked at the feedback on the DOCTYPE 
issue [1] and changed the spec in the following ways:

 * Removed mention of XSLT regarding the legacy DOCTYPE string, per 
   Julian's comment from last August. [2]

 * Changed "XSLT-compat" to "legacy-compat" as per the 
   suggestion made on the 2009-01-08 teleconference. [3]

 * Changed from using a fake public identifier to using a fake system 
   identifier per Philip's research. [4]

 * Added "about:" before the magic string as per Henri's suggestion. [5]

Rationale and comments: I apologise in advance for not having made 
everyone happy (in particular Lachlan raised the issue of the string 
"legacy-compat" being overly vague about who it is that we're being 
compatible with). I didn't want to make it even longer than it already is. 
I didn't use the string "sgml-compat", or variants on the theme such as 
"about:blank-dtd", because they seemed even more misleading -- we're not 
being compatible with SGML at all, and there is no DTD at all (indeed it 
makes no sense to even talk about a DTD here, this is neither XML nor 
SGML). I hope that this makes enough people happy.

I also moved the text about the XML DOCTYPE down to the new XHTML syntax 
section and elaborated a bit on the points made in that text.

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/54
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0922.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jan/0063.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jan/0160.html
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jan/0164.html

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

Received on Friday, 30 January 2009 08:26:59 UTC