Re: Why polyglot is needed

Henri Sivonen writes:

> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> My university serves html files as text/html.  I have no control over
>> that.  If I don't produce polyglot,
>
> You don't need to produce polyglot. If you serve text/html, it's
> sufficient to produce (valid) HTML. It doesn't need to be polyglot.

See previous discussion.  I work entirely in XML, for a wide range of
reasons, which I don't need to defend to make my point.

>> browsers do the wrong thing with, for instance [1], void tags.
>
> The only void element in that example is <hr/>. Voidness is bound to
> the element name--not to a slash. (The term "void" was coined to
> distinguish intrinsically end-tagless elements from the XML case where
> any element can opt out of having an end tag in any given instance.)

I guess I misunderstood the intended usage of the term, which is
relatively novel.  Happy to use any other label to identify the use of
the shorthand '/>' form.

>> Served as application/xml+xhtml, it validates
>>
> But served as text/html, it doesn't:
>> http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ltg.ed.ac.uk%2F~ht%2Fvoid_test.html
>
> The solution is either both serving and validating as text/html
> both serving and validating as application/xhtml+xml (and fixing the
> errors the validator finds either way). 

Ex hypothesi both those options are foreclosed.  You may think that
 a) I shouldn't want to work in XML
or
 b) My university should allow control of media types
but I do, and they don't, _and neither of those facts is unusual_.

As long as a constituency exists of which I'm representative,
documenting Polyglot provides a genuine service.

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
 [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2013 13:26:31 UTC