Re: An HTML language specification

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Mark Baker wrote:
>>
>> But I do consider this a different "where" than discussed before, when
>> I meant that I could live with the DOM being specified in a separate
>> section or a separate document.  I feel strongly that it should not be
>> specified inline with the meaning of the element and its attributes.
>
> Interesting.  I think the fundamental assumption, if the DOM interfaces are
> in the same document as the element name definitions, is that the most
> sensible place to put the description of the DOM interface an element
> implements is right next to where you describe everything else about the
> element.
>
> Now it might make sense to clearly separate the DOM interface part from the
> markup language part, but that's a formatting issue, not a content issue,
> and doesn't involve splitting up the specification or anything drastic like
> that.

I believe it to be more than a formatting issue.  Implementers of the
spec - especially those without a DOM - need to be able to determine
what part of the prose defines the language (which they need to know),
versus what defines the DOM (which they can ignore).  It's not always
clear cut.

Consider the definition of iframe.  I honestly don't know what part of
that section defines the meaning of the element.  The paragraph that
defines "sandbox" seems to be the only DOM-independent text I can find
there, so that would be part of it.  What about the rest (e.g. see the
HTML 4 definition)?

I agree that this doesn't necessitate a split of the spec (though I'd
still prefer that happened).  But I think the minimum required to
resolve the issue would be to split the definitions into two
independent sub-sections.

Mark.

Received on Monday, 24 November 2008 17:27:41 UTC