Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Aug 26, 2009, at 20:00, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> The reader also has to follow the links to section 6.12.1 in order
> to find the attribute definitions.  Has anyone tried to read
> this document in printed form?


I have, although that was in 2006 when the spec was under a megabyte  
in size.

I think using a CSS formatter that can turn document-internal links  
into page number references is essential. If you don't have such a CSS  
formatter, preformatted PDF versions are linked from the header of the  
WHATWG version of the spec.

On Aug 26, 2009, at 20:22, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> I don't care about that use case.  I care about knowing what each
> of those elements is intended to represent and knowing that those
> elements are not being used as they should.  I couldn't care less
> if every single browser had its own unique presentation of that
> brokenness and entirely different internal DOM structures.

Would you be OK with the abstract tree being called "the Infoset" as  
opposed to "the DOM"?

> None of that is relevant to *my* implementations of HTML.
[...]
> What I don't agree with is the theory that HTML can be *defined* in  
> terms of browser behavior.

My experience with developing Validator.nu has been that the spec is  
very suitable as a guide for writing non-DOM software.

Are you aware of the following text in the spec?
"Implementations that do not support scripting (or which have their  
scripting features disabled entirely) are exempt from supporting the  
events and DOM interfaces mentioned in this specification. For the  
parts of this specification that are defined in terms of an events  
model or in terms of the DOM, such user agents must still act as if  
events and the DOM were supported."
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#non-scripted

Thus, if your app doesn't support scripting (in the sense of executing  
author-supplied scripts), it doesn't need to have a concrete DOM, and  
"the DOM" in the spec can be treated as an abstract definitional aid  
like "the Infoset".

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 27 August 2009 10:28:34 UTC