Re: Is the P-word? (Was: TAG Decision on Rescinding the request to the HTML WG to develop a polyglot guide)

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> David Sheets, Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:13:23 -0800:
>> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>>> David Sheets, Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:18:00 -0800:
>
>>> The Polyglot Markup spec limits itself to define a subset of the HTML5
>>> spec, which permits meta@charset=UTF-8 in both XHTML code and HTML
>>> code, whereas the HTML5 spec only permits meta@http-equiv in HTML code.
>>
>> Are you referring to
>>
> <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/document-metadata.html#attr-meta-http-equiv-content-type>?
>
> Yes.
>
>   […]
>> This tag seems to be the most appropriate for expressing the
>> polyglot-ness of an (X)HTML document. Maybe there is another way to
>> declare this authorial intent, however.
>
> The heading of the HTML5 section is 'Encoding declaration state
> (http-equiv="content-type")'. Which indicates that it, from a
> conformance point of view, is seen as the encoding declaration state
> even if "charset" is lacking.

Examining the specified operational behavior, this "conformance point
of view" appears to be overly strict for no benefit and with no
consequences.

Are there actual semantic consequences to using <meta
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml" />?

> And, no, we are not really looking for
> any versioning method.

Who is "we"? What does this have to do with versioning? I am talking
about media types.

I want to declare interpretive intent. If an author is interested in
producing polyglot markup, it seems quite silly to force their
consumers to make guesses about which methods of interpretation can be
used. HTTP itself contains an Upgrade facility
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.42> and
it seems quite logical that a dual format facility should exist for
local, static resources or representations retrieved with protocols
that do not support authoritative, out-of-band metadata.

How does non-conformance to these legacy restrictions hurt anything?

David

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 02:04:29 UTC