Re: DOCTYPE versioning change proposal (ISSUE-4)

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > 
> > The html version string is allowed primarily because it may be useful 
> > for content management systems and other development workflows as a 
> > kind of metadata to indicate which specification was being consulted 
> > when the HTML content was being prepared.
> 
> The DOCTYPE is not intended for general purpose metadata.  Given that 
> you're talking about controlled environments, there's nothing stopping 
> such sytems utilising other mechanisms intended providing metadata, like 
> <meta> as was suggested earlier.

In fact, in controlled environments, the simplest solution is to write an 
additional specification specifically for that environment that extends 
HTML5 to add whatever preferred versioning feature the authors of those 
documents desire. There's no need to changr HTML5 itself to add this to 
pages restricted to a controlled environment. This gives the additional 
benefit that if the pages ever escape that environment, the proprietary 
additions would be immediately flagged by validators.


> Although, I've not seen any evidence that there are any such systems 
> that utilise versioning metadata like this.  Are you aware of any real 
> world CMSs today that do anything particularly useful with the 
> versioning informaton, and if so, what, and why is it a good design 
> pattern that should be endorsed by the spec in any way?

This is the kind of information that should be included in the Rationale 
section of the change proposal when it is updated per Maciej's comments.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 20:02:01 UTC