Re: NU’s polyglot possibilities (Was: The non-polyglot elephant in the room)

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Alex Russell <slightlyoff@google.com> wrote:
> What am I missing?

You aren't missing anything.

> Under what conditions can the expectations of producers
> and consumers of polyglot documents be simplified by the addition of
> polyglot markup to their existing world/toolchain?

1) The producer wants to maintain a document as a single file of bytes
on an HTTP server that serves from the file system.
AND
2) The producer wants to serve those bytes as text/html to cater to
the general public—including IE8.
AND
3) The producer wants to facilitate a non-browser consumer that
  a) Does not possess a conforming HTML parser.
AND
  b) Possesses an XML parser or a non-conforming HTML parser that
happens to barf less if the input is XML-like.
AND
  c) Is not seeking to consume Web content in general (as that would
necessitate violating condition a).
AND
  d) Has a line of communication back to the producer in order to
complain when the document inevitably becomes non-polyglot by accident
as a result of an edit.

So a very narrow case. Not worth a REC, in my opinion. A solution in
search of a problem.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/