Re: An HTML language specification

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> Other than HTML and XHTML, markup language specs from the W3C have moved to
> including definitions of the relevant DOM interfaces and other DOM support.
> This includes SVG, MathML, XBL2, XForms and SMIL3. I cannot offhand think of
> a W3C markup language other than HTML which has specialized DOM interfaces,
> but which doesn't specify them in the same document as the markup language
> itself. Therefore it seems to me that the W3C as a whole is moving away from
> the model you propose. I think HTML5 should stay aligned with that
> direction.

Maciej, there's two distinct issues here; *where* the specification of
the DOM resides, and *how* the language is defined.  It is not that
big a deal for me where the specification of the DOM goes; if it's
less work for the editor to keep it in the same spec, I can live with
that.  What is a big deal though, is that the language be defined
independently of the DOM.

I just quickly ran through the SVG 1.1 spec and only saw a handful of
instances where the definition of the vocabulary was in terms of the
DOM.  For MathML 2, I could find *no* examples where the definition
was made in DOM terms.  XForms 1.1 appears to be similar to SVG.  For
SMIL 3, I only found one example where the language definition
referred to the DOM.  XBL doesn't count because Hixie edits it too 8-)

Mark.

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2008 15:26:45 UTC