Re: HTML syntax

2007/11/21, Dean Edridge:
>
> I never said that wordpress was capable of producing valid XHTML. I'm
> well aware that it doesn't.
> Please read the thread. The thread is about whether or not to normalise
> the "quoted" or "no quoted" attibute habits and void element syntaxes
> between the two serialisations.

So you'd want HTML documents to look like XHTML ones yet not being
"XML-wellformed", and with some differences on the parsing side,
leading to incompatibilities wrt scripting and styling (think TBODY,
TABLE/OL/UL inside P, etc.)
This would bring even more confusion, rather than solve anything.

The primary goal of the "parsing" section of the spec is to define a
parser compatible with what browsers do today (this cannot be entirely
true given that browsers have incompatible behaviours in some cases),
so that a browser that implements this section can be used with HTML
4, HTML3, tag soup, etc. pages found in the wild.
If you want to build a stricter parser, new browsers will have to
implement another "tag soup" parser and a switching mechanism between
its two parsers. Clearly, in this situation, no-one would want to
build a new browser, that'd be far too much work (moreover given that
there are some good open-source ones already).
If you only want to set "best practices" and still have a parsing
algorithm like the one already in the HTML5 spec, be sure that most
people won't follow your syntax rules: if the parser accomodates with
unquoted attribute values, why should I bother quoting them? (among
other things).

I was heartedly promoting XHTML a few years ago, that's no longer the
case: I've learned to be more pragmatic.

-- 
Thomas Broyer