Re: The underappreciated merits of HTML

Uche Ogbuji scripsit:

>  I think it's one thing to say "hey guys, why not just use the HTML
> vocab rather than reinventing that wheel for content that's not too
> many steps removed from presentation."  It's quite another to say "Hey
> put this bit of cryptic fluff at the top of your documents so that
> browsers magically behave themselves when they see it."

Well, we're assuming people's familiarity with HTML.  The future is
longer than the past, so I think we can also assume that people will
be in the habit of putting the cryptic fluff at the beginning of their
HTML documents.

I look at it this way:  For MicroXML purposes, the DOCTYPE tag is a PI
with weird syntax whose target is a browser, just as PIs are comments
with weird syntax whose targets are programs rather than humans.

> Gosh, to go further, given the history of HTML and the folks behind
> HTML5, who is to say the nature of that hack won't change arbitrarily
> a couple of years by now? Hardly a sane mule to which to yoke our cart.

>From what I understand, they picked that hack because it already worked
in all browsers to trigger standards mode, so they aren't likely to
change it now, any more than Unix-like systems are likely to change the
#! hack (which is not part of any standard).

> And as Mike S pointed out, it is a major complication, even if the
> spec just claims "Oh never mind what that syntactical appendix means,
> just spell it exactly as we say."  That was what they tried with the
> whole "The namespace is just a string, not a URL."  Well, people
> looked at it and heck it looks like a URI, so sorry, how is it not a
> URI again?

Granted, but that's because they already knew URIs from browsers.  I
think of this as much more like the CDATA hack, whose spelling only
makes sense if you are an SGML weenie.  (The reason we don't want the
CDATA hack is that it's dangerous, not because of its spelling.)

> 3000-message W3C mailing lists on angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin,

Okay, time to fess up publicly: it was I who blew the whistle on the W3C's
relative URI plan twelve years ago and triggered that extended flamewar.
So sue me.

> The point is that if it even looks like a DTDecl, it will ultimately
> bring in a sizable portion of the brain-baggage of DTDeclas, whether
> we like it or not, whatever we may say in the spec.

Again, I think that's only true for XML weenies, not for our target
audience of HTML users who want something a little better.

-- 
One art / There is                      John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
No less / No more                       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
All things / To do
With sparks / Galore                     --Douglas Hofstadter

Received on Wednesday, 5 September 2012 05:20:49 UTC