Re: Formal definition of HTML5 (was Re: Version information)

On Apr 13, 2007, at 23:58, Ian Hickson wrote:

>> This means, in practice, that standard conformance will be 
>> administered
>> by a number of third party vendors who will use different technologies
>> and specification techniques of their own choice to check documents.
>
> Yup, just like browsers use different technologies and specification
> techniques of their own choice to render documents.

Thanks agian for some really thorough and useful answers.

However, as a developer I don't like the idea of being dependend on 
proprietary blackboxes for validation.

Today I can just pick up an xml parser, the xhtml DTD and then validate 
XHTML markup just as I validate any other XML document. (I haven't 
tried it with HTML, but I guess there are also some SGML parsers 
around.)

The same goes for authoring tools. I think It would be good for the web 
to have schema driven authoring tools that could allways refer to the 
latest version of a normative HTML5 schema - even if they miss out some 
aspects of the language.

In my view, you should have really some compelling reasons for not not 
defining HTML5 by means of a schema. Could you be a little more 
specific on this?

So far I've heard that this is about failure of XML schemas to 
represent complex attribute syntax.

Is this really a big problem?
Would it be possible to fix this in XML?

--
Henrik

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2007 08:20:27 UTC