Re: Validating XHTML5 with XML entities

On Aug 27, 2008, at 23:59, Sam Ruby wrote:

> It occurs to me that if somebody were to do the work of producing a  
> full DTD for XHTML5, such work could be considered by this workgroup  
> either to be included in the HTML 5 standard, or as a standalone  
> document.


I think that's not a good idea.

Writing a DTD for XHTML5 for the purpose of getting entities doesn't  
make sense unless browsers recognize it. Making the browsers recognize  
it would gratuitously break compatibility with existing browsers  
compared to just using one of the legacy public identifiers that  
browsers do recognize. (If one is willing to break compatibility with  
existing browsers, one might as well implement SVG output from  
WordPress using the commented-out SVG-in-text/html scheme. The whole  
point of that scheme is catering to tools like WordPress.)

Writing a DTD for validation doesn't make sense when DTDs are dying  
technology that is documented to be inadequate and is mostly abandoned  
by the XML community and better schema technology exists and an actual  
liberally-licensed schema using the newer and better schema technology  
exists.

Finally, I think implementations of any kind should not be blessed as  
part of the spec. (We aren't including canonical C++ code, either.)

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

Received on Thursday, 28 August 2008 06:42:06 UTC