- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:58:03 +0100
- To: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- CC: Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Lachlan Hunt wrote: > ... > Considering the fact that both you and DanC [1] mistakenly typed a > non-well-formed version of the DOCTYPE, and that on occasion, even I > have accidentally omitted the PUBLIC keyword while typing the HTML4 > DOCTYPEs, I think this is evidence that it is more prone to errors and > that we should not encourage people to use it at all. I think it is > better to actively discourage its use and this is one reason why the > perjorative alternatives are preferred. > ... The whole point in allowing a second doctype (or for changing it) is to allow more people to produce *valid* documents right now. It's not a feature for people who do not care about validity. And no, I disagree that the 2nd notation needs to be ugly. It should be as valid as the other one, so there's actually no reason to push people into one direction. >> 2) DOCTYPE with an optional null quoted string > > This alternative fails to discourage people from trying to use the > longer alternative. Which, to me, is a non-goal. > We know from experience that people will often use the longer version of > the HTML4 DOCTYPEs including the optional SYSTEM identifier, despite the > fact that it is optional. It seems that there is a general perception > that the longer alternative is better. Why does it matter? > ... > I'm fine with both of these alternatives, although I have a preference > for the latter because of the reason I pointed out in IRC yesterday [2]: > > <Lachy> the only problem with legacy-compat is that it's not entirely > clear that it's meant for compat with legacy generator tools, > like XSLT, rather than legacy consumers like browsers > ... This has been clarified a number of times by now; it's an issue that not only applies to XSLT. > Additionally, it's not clear to me which tools besides XSLT have > difficulty outputting <!DOCTYPE html> in HTML serialisations, and thus > what problem we are solving by changing "XSLT-compat" to > "legacy-compat". (If such tools have been mentioned in previous > threads, then I may have missed them) Apparently. > ... Best regards, Julian
Received on Saturday, 17 January 2009 16:58:49 UTC