- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:14:31 -0700
- To: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Cc: David Singer <singer@apple.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>, HTMLwg WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Mar 23, 2010, at 7:24 AM, Sam Ruby wrote: > > The following is a suggestion that I don't expect will not initially > be popular, but I will put it out there in the spirit of > brainstorming. It truly is a "lets turn lemons into lemonade" > suggestion. I ask that everybody treat is as such. > > There is a sincere desire by some people to require ampersands to be > escaped, quote all attributes, close all open tags, get rid of tags > such as acronym, and to rid the internet of the scourge that is > presentational markup. > > At the same time, the discussion about "this is XHTML" vs "not it is > not" is showing no signs of going away. This discussion even > persists when the alleged XHTML is served as text/html, does not > conform to any known schema or DTD, and even when is not well- > formed. I think that we have an opportunity to change the topic. > > One possibility is to change the definition of the xmlns attribute > on the html tag from being a talisman to an opt-in to best practices. > > One downside of such an approach is that it would provide any means > for people who author content intended to be served as application/ > xhtml+xml to opt out. Another downside is that many people who want to "opt in to best practices" would not agree that including the string 'xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/ "' in a text/html document is itself a best practice. If you want to propose multiple validator modes triggered by something in the document itself, I would suggest using something less potentially polarizing as the trigger. That would also address the downside that you stated. Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 21:15:05 UTC