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

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>
> Making a single document that works in both serializations is 
> significantly trickier than just using quotes around attributes.

Really? What about this below? Only the mime type would need to be changed:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
    <p class="top-paragraph" id="something">
       Hello World
    </p>
</body>
</html>

> 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.

Yes I know, thanks.
And why is this a reason to have discrepancies between the two 
languages/serialisations?
Surely, if anything, it is a good reason to encourage the reduction of 
discrepancies between the languages.

> In any case, a CMS that does target producing single chameleon markup 
> documents will need to follow the right conventions.

But that wouldn't be so differcult.

> That doesn't necessarily mean those rules are right for authors 
> writing pure HTML by hand, or for XML-only document processing systems.

Why not?

>
> 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.

There is a method that is suitable for all circumstances, that's the 
beauty of (X)HTML5:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
    <p class="top-paragraph" id="something">
       Hello World
    </p>
</body>
</html>
 

Wouldn't it be better to encourage people to markup their webpages like 
this?
The less choosing the author has to do the better.

Unnecessarily having two or more methods of quoting makes it much more 
difficult to have HTML and XHTML in the world at the same time.
I don't see what is to gain from having unneeded discrepancies between 
HTML and XHTML.

My point is this: in regards to the quoting of attributes there doesn't 
need to be two or more different ways to write up a (X)HTML document. Of 
course, I don't have a problem with authors leaving out the namespace 
attribute when intending to author in text/html as this is easily 
altered later if someone wanted to convert the document to XHTML.

Regards,
Dean Edridge

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 13:29:46 UTC