Re: ISSUE-54: doctype-legacy-compat

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>
> On Jan 16, 2009, at 14:48 , Sam Ruby wrote:
>>
>> One such tool is mentioned in the bug report[8] cited in my prior email:
>>
>> [8] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6336
>>
>
> As one who uses such tools, I would tend to think that I would expect them
> to require updates to their HTML serialisations in order to support new
> empty elements anyway, and therefore that tossing in a change for the
> DOCTYPE wouldn't be much work. For the user who really wants to produce
> HTML5 the tooling update is minimal; and if there's anyone out there who is
> at the same time so cutting edge that they want to produce HTML5 but so
> conservative that they won't upgrade a serialisation library I would tend to
> think that they have enough issues of their own that we don't need to
> meddle.

And for them, an easy workaround is to prepend a hard-coded <!DOCTYPE
html> at the end of their serialization chain (in Java, that would
mean plugging the attached Writer –which could probably be improved
performance-wise– somewhere between your producer/serializer and
output stream).

So I totally agree with you that it's not really a problem...
...except for tools based on specs that do not allow outputting the
HTML5 doctype (such as XSLT): updating the tool is not enough, the
spec has to change too; and if it already has been superseded (such as
XSLT 1.0) there little to no chance that it'll be updated (and that
then tools align with the updated spec).
So I think a "compat" DOCTYPE has to be allowed.

I'm fine with either:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "legacy-generator-compat" ""> (provided noone
can point to a tool that couldn't output an empty system ID) or
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "legacy-generator-compat" "about:whatever"> or
<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "about:whatever">

where about:whatever is any about:* URL (or data:* URL? or tag:* URL?
or actually any URL). This I don't mind, but I'm opposed to <!DOCTYPE
html PUBLIC ""> and similar proposals for the reasons already
expressed by others (error-prone, not evident why it exists so will
lead to flamewars, etc.).


-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Friday, 16 January 2009 15:05:31 UTC