Re: 3.6. The root element

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 10:31:18PM -0500, Robert Burns wrote:
>
> Based on this thread, I offer the following text to substitute for the 
> current subsection.


I haven't been following all of the discussion, but this proposal seems
reasonable, with one caveat:
> Simply for convenience — to make 
> migration to and from XHTML mildly easier — authors may include a default 
> namespace declaration even within the text/html serialization. For example:

The current draft is more precise than this. It states that an xmlns attribute
may be present if and only if it has a specified value. I think this more
exact statement needs to be retained.

Also, here, and elsewhere in the proposal, requirements are stated in terms of
what authors may or may not do, whereas the specification should instead say
what is (and isn't) a conforming HTML document, as the current draft does.
Although this is an editorial comment, it is important to distinguish between
"author requirements" and document conformance requirements, noting that the
spec prescribes the latter rather than the former. (What authors are required
to do is to create syntactically and semantically correct documents, as is
clarified in the conformance section. Format converters and wysiwyg editors
are given greater scope for error on the semantic side.)

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 04:22:14 UTC