Re: Re-registration of text/html

> What specific 
> text in RFC2854 allows HTML, HTML+, HTML2, and HTML3.2 to be used with 
> text/html? I'd be happy to use the same text in our IANA registration (and 
> of course adding HTML4).
> 
> (I thought I'd asked this before, but I couldn't find an answer in my IMAP 
> folders, Bugzilla, or any of the mail archives, so apologies if this is a 
> repeat question. Please feel free to just point me to the previous reply 
> if there is one.)

Perhaps you're remembering this 1 Feb message of yours:

"Could you point to the text in the current text/html RFC that does this, 
so that I could use that same text in HTML5?"
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2010Feb/0007.html

to which I replied:

"Umm... no, not exactly; my memory was buggy"

I've been noodling about this a bit since then; here's something
I scribbled down the other day...

Hmm... this is perhaps overtaken by recent edits; I see
"To help authors transition from HTML4 and XHTML1,
an obsolete permitted DOCTYPE string ..." is
not in the pink UA style.

Anyway... this is what I was thinking a few days ago:

There are tons of people and applications that produce conforming
HTML 4 and XHTML 1 documents -- documents that would conform
to HTML 5 too, but for their <!DOCTYPE...> -- and serve them
as text/html; I don't see any argument that would persuade the
IETF to make these documents no longer conform to the text/html
media type.

Recent HTML 5 specs say that to serve a document as text/html is to
claim that the document fits in the HTML 5 syntax, but
these conforming HTML 4 and XHTML 1 documents don't fit in the
HTML 5 syntax (the "obsolete but conforming DOCTYPE" stuff is
in the "this is for UA implementors" pink style, not part
of the HTML 5 syntax).

Perhaps the smallest change would be to take out

  Labeling a resource with the text/html type asserts that
  the resource is an HTML document using the HTML syntax.

and replace it with something along the lines of:

  Serving a document as text/plain licenses processing
  by user agents as specified in this spec.
  (specifically, section 8.2 Parsing HTML documents)
  Documents served as text/plain *should* conform
  to the HTML 5 syntax, but consumers should beware
  that existing content varies considerably; note especially
  section 11 on Obsolete features.



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 21:57:26 UTC