Re: Terminology: "document"

On Oct 3, 2007, at 17:53, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> (For the benefit of those who look up things piecemeal in the spec
>
> Which is pretty much everyone, in my experience, especially with a  
> spec this size.

Agreed.

>> to whom it isn't clear that the spec looks everything through DOM- 
>> colored glasses and who assume general English meaning of words,
>
> Does the spec use a different term to refer to the Document object  
> then?

It uses Document with capital D and <code> markup styled in a  
distinct way except in the terms "HTML document" and "XML document".

> Using a single word to mean two different things depending on the  
> context (which is not always clear in this spec, in my experience)  
> seems like a bad idea.

I searched around the draft for "document". It appears that  
"document" is most often used in a generic English sense meaning the  
document in an abstract representation-independent sense (i.e. DOM  
tree specifically). The usage turns to DOM representations around the  
definitions of "HTML document" and "XML document". When the DOM  
representation is referred to, saying "document tree" (or "|Document|  
object") would be better.

The sentence "|Document| objects are assumed to be XML documents  
unless they are flagged as being HTML documents when they are  
created. Whether a document is an HTML document or an XML document  
affects the behaviour of certain APIs, as well as a few CSS rendering  
rules." could be clarified as "|Document| objects are assumed to  
represent XML documents unless they are flagged as representing HTML  
documents when they are created. Whether |Document| object represents  
an HTML document or an XML document affects the behaviour of certain  
APIs, as well as a few CSS rendering rules."

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 14:06:25 UTC