Re: Cleaning House

Philip Taylor wrote:
> ...
> I'm not actually sure why HTML5 parses unknown elements and <span> in 
> that way, since it doesn't match IE6, though I assume there's a reason 
> somewhere... But in any case, other deprecated/removed elements like 
> <xmp> do have to be explicitly specified with special parsing rules and 
> not treated like unknown elements, otherwise some sites will be parsed 
> very wrongly.
> 
> So the specification has to 'support' all these elements in the sense of 
> defining how they're processed by UAs (regardless of whether authors may 
> or must not use them), rather than falling back on the behaviour for 
> unrecognised elements, else it would be useless to anyone trying to 
> parse the web (especially those who aren't already browser vendors with 
> existing code that can handle these cases).
> ...

I do understand why a specification for HTML5 parsing needs to specify 
that. However, a spec for HTML5 authors shouldn't even mention these 
special case in parsing rules: all I need to know is what tags are 
allowed where, and whether I need (or am allowed) to close them. In 
particular, producers of HTML5 documents shouldn't need to read about 
how broken documents are processed; they are expected to produce correct 
ones, right?

So: in favor of splitting the spec (language spec / parser spec).

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 07:22:51 UTC