Re: Proposal for developing HTML 5 materials for Web *authors*

On Nov 21, 2007, at 3:31 AM, Dean Edridge wrote:

> Why would it be a good idea to encourage people to omit quotes  
> around attribute values, when this method would only be suitable for  
> *one* of the *three* serialisations of (X)HTML5 ?

I don't think we should encourage it. I don't necessarily think we  
should discourage it either. It's up to projects and organizations to  
choose their coding conventions, based on what is appropriate for  
their particular situation.

> application/xhtml+xml (XHTML)
> application/xml (XHTML)
> text/html (HTML)

The first two are the same serialization.

> Surely it would be better to have just the one method that works  
> with all serialisations and get everyone to use that.
> Otherwise we end up with web tools (WYSIWYG editors and CMSs etc)  
> that only generate markup suitable for text/html.

Making a single document that works in both serializations is  
significantly trickier than just using quotes around attributes. A CMS  
that wants to generate both HTML and XHTML needs to work at a higher  
level of abstraction than string pasting and can therefore produce  
separate documents for each serialization. In any case, a CMS that  
does target producing single chameleon markup documents will need to  
follow the right conventions. That doesn't necessarily mean those  
rules are right for authors writing pure HTML by hand, or for XML-only  
document processing systems.

Anyway, my point is just that I think both ways of writing it are  
reasonable in different situations, and should be chosen based on  
circumstances.

Regards,
Maciej