Re: Rethinking HTML 5 (Was: Re: Semicolon after entities)

On May 1, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Shane McCarron wrote:

>
>
>
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> This seems to be the source of contention in the current debate.   
>> For the spec to be implementable, it needs to define conformance  
>> requirements for UAs, including error handling and how to handle  
>> both existing and future content.
>
> Perhaps if those implementation conformance constraints were  
> defined in a separate specification, it would help to clearly  
> divide the issue?  In the case of XHTML 2 the plan was always to  
> have an implementors guide that went along with it to provide the  
> sort of information I think you are talking about; but without  
> confusing the authoring community with a lot of data that, frankly,  
> is very domain specific.

I think it's a mistake to consider document conformance requirements  
to be general-purpose and user agent conformance requirements to be  
"domain specific". First, it is essential that the two match up when  
they overlap. Second, authors generally learn the language from  
secondary sources, such as books, articles, tutorials, reference  
guides, classes and examples. But none of those things exist for  
implementors. So leaving out user agent conformance requirements to  
make it easier for authors to read the spec is a bad tradeoff.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 18:42:27 UTC