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

Hi Julian,

On Jul 23, 2008, at 2:06 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

>
> Michael A. Puls II wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>  
>> wrote:
>>> 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)."
>> That makes perfect sense to me. It's making it clear that such XML
>> documents may contain <!DOCTYPE html>.  That sounds a lot better than
>> "a DOCTYPE", which could mean any doctype.
>
> Hm. So are you saying that they can't use any doctype?

I think we're confusing issues here. For XML authors they can  
certainly use any valid doctype declaration they want. To make an  
HTML5 XML document, they may use a doctype declaration or omit the  
doctype declaration. However, if they include a doctype declaration on  
the HTML5 document it must be "<!DOCTYPE html>".

The second issue is how HTML5 might be used or reused in other XML  
document formats. In that case an author may use create a different  
XML document format (aka application) that builds on HTML5. Such a  
document format could use any author determined doctype declaration  
and point to other newly authored specifications or machine readable  
schema that vicariously includes the HTML5 specification.

On the other hand, HTML5 might also be used within a compound XML  
document that is of a different document type than the HTML5 XML  
document type. In that case the doctype declaration will again be  
other than the HTML5 doctype declaration. However, this would again be  
beyond our scope to determine.

The only part that could fall within our scope is:
1) to provide schema authors with guidance on how to include HTML5  
within their own schema and;
2) to provide compound document authors with guidance on how to  
include XML serialized HTML5 within non-HTML5 documents

I hope that helps clarify the situation.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2008 11:22:12 UTC