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

On Apr 16, 2007, at 15:33, Henrik Dvergsdal wrote:

> Where the schema language is not expressive enough and where it is  
> not feasible to use the schema syntax directly, we include  
> additional formal descriptions and rules in the text.

What kind of formalism did you have in mind?

> 1. It will facilitate a more tidy and efficient way of managing the  
> standard. It is already quite extensive and complex and when the  
> rendering section is included, its going to be huge.

RELAX NG Compact Syntax with the fantasai indent style (for  
readability) does not take less lines than Hixie's English.

> 4. We will reduce the number of bugs caused by the translation step  
> from prose to schema.

James Graham's second point is an excellent reply to this.

> In Sivonens schema the TABLE element is defined as follows (my  
> formatting):
>
> table.inner =
>   (caption.elem?, colgroup.elem*, thead.elem?,
>   ((tfoot.elem, (tbody.elem+ | tr.elem+)) | (( tbody.elem+ | tr.elem 
> +), tfoot.elem?)))
>
> Can you spot the difference versus the english prose above?

Fixed and deployed. Thanks.

(Simon Pieters raised the issue of overuse of one or more as opposed  
to zero or more in the table content models, so both the prose and  
the schema may well change.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 13:21:33 UTC