Re: The non-polyglot elephant in the room

On 1/21/2013 9:47 AM, Michael[tm] Smith wrote:
> So people can already determine that with the validator just by manually
> running their documents through it twice: once with the HTML option
> selected, and then again with the XHTML option selected.

Right, but I think polyglot is a bit more limited than the intersection: I 
believe that the intention with polyglot is to avoid constructs that are 
valid per each spec separately, but that are interpreted incompatibly (e.g. 
for purposes of DOM building and scripting).

I (personally and with TAG hat on) am in favor of publishing the polyglot 
spec, but I doubt that effective validation can be achieved with just 
running the two validators as they are.

FWIW: I think there is a non-trivial and interesting pile of software that 
consumes XML and that is unlikely to be modified to use an HTML5 parser. I 
think it's reasonable to set down some guidelines for authors pointing out 
the subset of HTML5 that's likely to be interpreted appropriately as XML 
and HTML. Having a validator for that subset would be nice, but seems to me 
not essential to justifying the polyglot spec.

If I were, say, in a corporation and doing a project that required our HTML 
content to be processed by existing XML tools that aren't easily modified 
with HTML5 parsers, then having a polyglot spec to point to would be very 
helpful.

Noah