Re: text/html fallback using the Same Bytes

On 10/01/2011 09:31, Henri Sivonen wrote:


> My concern is based on precedent. The "Polyglot Markup" publication
> of the HTML WG is basically Appendix C done better. We can look back
> as see what happened with Appendix C.

I can see how appendix C would lead to your views, it was pretty much a
disgrace really, as without changing html specification in any way, it
suggested that it was OK to serve xhtml (necessarily syntactically
incorrect HTML4) as text/html. Thus it was relying on the fact that
browsers didn't implement html4 as specified, which was a pretty strange
thing for the organisation standardising html to do.

But that's in the past and the polyglot document isn't doing that at
all. It is documenting the way one may use xml tools to generate
documents that _by definition_ work as intended when served as text/html 
and parsed as html5.

Actually of course it doesn't tell users how to generate documents that
meet these constraints, just documents what the constraints are, which
is a problem that needs to be addressed at some point, but still it's a
necessary and useful start. Also the actual constraints needed are more
arcane than they could be (because making them less arcane wasn't a
design consideration in html5 as currently specified).

David

________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Monday, 10 January 2011 10:06:56 UTC