Re: Serializer unavailability

On 06/01/2011 13:30, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> The unavailability of a serializer problem basically boils down to asking the developers of consuming software make changes to their software because the developers of the producer software can't be bothered to change their software.

That's one way to describe it:-)

An alternative view is that

a) there are (in practice) a lot more producers than consumers, and many 
of those produces are people rather than software, so harder to update. 
  Also, using an html serialiser in place of an xml serialiser is only 
naturally a solution for use cases that currently use an xml  serialiser.

So if xslt adds html5 serialisation and I'm using xslt, then fine (but 
see (c) below) however if I'm authoring the page directly I'd typically 
use an editor that gives direct control over the syntax and saves the 
edit buffer directly to file, so in that case I (and similar authors) 
need to learn the html5 grammar with these arcane compatibility rules.


b) there are benefits in having a more rational language to avoid the 
permanent costs involved in avoiding the special cases that are 
currently baked into the html spec (font elements with certain 
attributes....) although as you correctly observe that has to be weighed 
against the costs of dealing with legacy software and legacy content.

c) having an html serialiser only addresses some of the issues.
It solves the problems surrounding /> empty element syntax, but it 
doesn't solve the problems surrounding elements with html element names 
in foreign content, as they can not be serialised as html.


David



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Received on Thursday, 6 January 2011 14:03:56 UTC