Re: 6. Are bare DOCTYPE declarations allowed?

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 9:30 AM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> Uche Ogbuji scripsit:
>
> > I do not think we should allow bare DOCTYPE.    I don't find the HTML5
> > argument compelling enough to add such a large slice of syntax.  I think
> we
> > should get used to having a processing stage that converts documents from
> > XXX format to MicroXML.
>
> I disagree.  One of the nice things about MicroXML documents, indeed
> James's original motivation for them, is that they are a good format
> for human readable documents.  You can keep them around for processing
> with XML or MicroXML toolchains, but if they use the right elements
> and attributes, you can also view them casually in any web browser.
> The only price of that is a fifteen-character signal (sixteen if you
> have a trailing newline) that forces the web browser to DTRT rather than
> enabling some unpredictable quirks mode.
>

Wow there is an enormous leap in that "if they use the right elements and
attributes."  I am not so convinced that people will suddenly start using
HTML as their tag lingua franca in MicroXML.  If they did, they would more
likely just skip MicroXML altogether and stick to an HTML toolchain.



> If some HTML5 lawyer can show that MicroXML documents using the HTML5
> vocabularies don't require the doctype to be processed in standards mode,
> or that standards mode vs. quirks mode makes no difference, I'd happily
> stuff doctypes down the oubliette.  But until that day, allowing them
> is cheap insurance.  I'd even be happy to allow only "<!DOCTYPE html>"
> and no other form.  Think of it as a PI with weird syntax (and PIs as
> comments with weird syntax).
>

I think we can have human-readable documents in the vocab of choice in
MicroXML and then have them transformed to or dressed up as HTML at the
edges of the toolchain.  That's the predominant approach today.  There is
very little use of XHTML, even XHTML5.  Data people use XML assembled from
their DBMS and fling it at XSLT.  Content people use richer vocabularies
(e.g. DITA, Docbook, etc.), or wizards that do the same under the bonnet.
 I find "<!DOCTYPE html>" a rather large addition for a rather small use
case.


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Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2012 15:46:29 UTC