- From: Eric Daspet <eric.daspet@survol.fr>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:43:05 +0200
- CC: public-html@w3.org, ian@hixie.ch
Ian Hickson a écrit : > SGML/XML aren't relevant to this discussion, as we're not talking about > the SGML or XML serialisations of HTML, but the text/html serialistion. I didn't notice that the "short" doctype may not be valid in a pure xml or sgml serialisation. SGML and XML serialisation are relevant here in my humble opinion. If we use the "short" doctype <!DOCTYPE html> we will confuse people who are used to xml, sgml and/or html4. The doctype will not appears "valid" or "as usual" for them. We will have a hard time to explain why we have two (or more) possible doctype, one for the html serialisation and one for the xml/sgml serialisation. Again, we will confuse people. As a direct consequence we will see with documents in html serialisation with a doctype from xml serialisation, and xml serialisations with a doctype from html serialisation. *IF* we decide we need a doctype, we need to have a doctype which will be exactly the same in all serialisations. Therefore we will need a doctype valid in sgml as in xml. All this is true for both "doctype with version" and "doctype without version" arguments. But, again, why do we really want to require a doctype in the document ? - Doctype may be usefull to SGML but we trash SGML as a need and no modern browser use the DTD. - Doctype may be usefull to versionning but you advice not to version html. - Doctype may be usefull to editors but a schema / relaxng will be better and a direct support by the editor is certainly the way to go (and not a dtd expliclitly in the document). I left only one usage : versionning. Doctype switching is a kind of versionning. Triggering a "new standard mode for html 5+" is also some kind of versionning (and we will face the same problems for html 6, so a "new new standard mode" will be needed in future). Is doctype the better solution for versionning ? A simple "version" attribute in the <html> tag is simplier and does not interfer with serialisations. We can even name it "standard-mode" instead of "version" if we really want a single shot switching and not a versionning. -- Éric Daspet http://eric.daspet.name/
Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 22:43:07 UTC