- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:13:33 -0800
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > (Of course, many of the conformance criteria relevant to mainstream > browsers won't apply to other kinds of software. Fortunately, HTML5 > defines a number of conformance classes: > <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#conformance-requirements>. The classes > "data mining tool" and "markup generator" cover between them any tool > that takes HTML as input or output, and are free of browser-specific > concerns.) Sadly this isn't true. For instance, in data mining, "Applications and tools that process HTML and XHTML documents for reasons other than to either render the documents or check them for conformance should act in accordance to the semantics of the documents that they process." This statement indicates an underlying belief that semantics are interoperable and that a document can in fact be said to have a particular set of semantics which can be shared and transferred between independent parties. Of course, I expect most data mining tools to more or less ignore this statement and infer whatever set of semantics they need from the syntax. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Refactoring HTML Just Published! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 16:14:11 UTC