Re: Notes on the draft polyglot document Polyglot document

On 06/09/2010 01:21 PM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> The TAG has reviewed the editor's draft  "HTML/XHTML Compatibility
> Authoring Guidelines"
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-xhtml-author-guide/html-xhtml-authoring-guide.html
>
>
as retreived 2010-06-09 CVS rev 1.14
> We welcome this effort and have a few suggestions as follows.
>
> 1. The document should be couched as a specification. It specifies a
> set of documents, defined by various constraints,  most (though not
> all, because of the constraints on what scripts do) of which can be
> checked by a validator.   (This is useful spec, even though of course
> there are many types of document which are not exactly as defined
> which also have interesting properties).

I don't think it makes sense to make this document normative on that 
basis. The allowed content of a polyglot document is purely inferred 
from other, already normative, texts. Giving the same status to the 
underlying rules and the inferred rules seems like a recipe for trouble 
since one is effectively defining the same thing in multiple places.

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2010 11:36:32 UTC