Re: Doctype on text/html Pages (Was: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart)

Hi Julian,

On Jul 22, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

>
> Robert J Burns wrote:
>> ...
>> For an XML implementation to process HTML5 it has to know when it  
>> is encountering HTML5 (or any similar HTML serialized as XML).  
>> Without a mechanism to do that, the processor will not know it is  
>> HTML. In documents conforming to the Namespaces in XML  
>> recommendation, the HTML namespace URI provides that information to  
>> the processor. In non-namespaced documents or in non-namespace  
>> aware processing applications, there has to be another mechanism.  
>> One mechanism might be ...
>
> Not sure what you're talking about. XHTML 1.* and the XML  
> serialization of HTML5 always use XML namespaces.
>
> What am I missing?

I guess you're right about that. We do require namespace processing to  
process HTML5. However, that gets away from the thrust of the message  
anyway. The point is that even if we allow the doctype to be omitted,  
should we even be discussing the option for authors to use a different  
doctype that doesn't relate to this specification (using a different  
doctype implies not HTML5 so its outside our scope). Why not instead  
say explicitly the following?

"XML serialized HTML5 Documents may omit the doctype. When including a  
doctype, authors must use "<!DOCTYPE html>" (just like the text/html  
serialization)."

And I have to reiterate this. The issue of the doctype has got  
absolutely nothing to do with us requiring XML serialization  
processing HTML5 applications to handle all of the same named  
character references as we require of the text/html serialized  
processing applications.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:51:17 UTC