Rescinding the request to the HTML WG to develop a polyglot guide

In March 2010, the following request from the TAG was conveyed to the HTML WG:

>     The W3C TAG requests there should be in TR space a document
>     which specifies how one can create a set of bits which can
>     be served EITHER as text/html OR as application/xhtml+xml,
>     which will work identically in a browser in both bases.
>     (As Sam does on his web site.)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Mar/0703.html

However, subsequently, the TAG requested the creation of an HTML–XML
Task Force (of which I was a member) and the Task Force Report
remarked “Another line of argument suggests that even under the most
optimistic of projections, so tiny a fraction of the web will ever be
written in Polyglot that there's no practical benefit to pursuing it
as a general strategy for consuming documents from the web. If you
want to consume HTML content, use an HTML parser that produces an
XML-compatible DOM or event stream.”
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-xml-tf-report/

Considering that a Task Force created at the TAG’s request identified
a non-polyglot-based approach of feeding HTML content into XML tooling
and the alternative is more broadly applicable than polyglot, as it
does not require the cooperation of the originator of the content,
would the TAG, please, consider rescinding its earlier request to the
HTML WG (quoted above) as having been obsoleted by later findings?

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

Received on Friday, 30 November 2012 16:17:09 UTC