Re: Why polyglot is needed

On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:31:58 +0100, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Henri Sivonen writes:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>  
>> wrote:
>>> Ex hypothesi both those options are foreclosed.  You may think that
>>>  a) I shouldn't want to work in XML
>>
>> I don't. I think you need to use a text/html serializer at the end of
>> your workflow. As far as publishing goes, the text/html serializer
>> doesn't need to be polyglot. (As seen from your example, a
>> text/html-unaware XML serializer won't do.)
>
> But that involves me in maintaining two distint-but-equivalent end
> products, the XML one which I use for my own purposes, and the
> text/html one, which I use only for publishing.  That's bad software
> engineering.
>
> More to the point, it's un-necessary.  The whole point of this
> exercise is that _polyglot exists_.  And those of us who operate in
> XML-space are used to producing its predecessor, i.e.
> Appendix-C-XHTML, and we see benefit in continuing to do the parallel
> thing as the world transitions to HTML5.
>
> No-one, as far as I know, denies that there _is_ a maximally bilingual
> subset of HTML5.  All we're arguing about is whether the W3C should
> document it in TR space.

No, we are only arguing whether that document is something the TAG should
be spending time on, as opposed to leaving it to the HTML WG and doing
other things.

cheers

Chaals

>> If you want to re-ingest into your workflow as XML the same bytes that
>> you are forced to publish as HTML, then you have a polyglot use case,
>> but stipulating that they have to be the same bytes is a self-imposed
>> constraint. I'm not even opposing to you self-imposing such a
>> contraint on yourself if you write your own tooling for satisfying the
>> constraint. I'm against presenting the case as something that should
>> have general (as opposed to special-case) utility and tool support,
>> which is what publication by the W3C would look like.
>
> One person's special case is another's common-sense sweet-spot.  Just
> as Appendix-C-XHTML addressed a niche, so does Polyglot.  Having
> TR-space documentation of Appendix-C-XHTML didn't prevent ordinary
> HTML from dominating the Web, and neither will having TR-space
> documentation of Polyglot.
>
> ht


-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
           chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2013 19:52:05 UTC