Re: Bug 7034

On Mar 23, 2010, at 7:24 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>
> The following is a suggestion that I don't expect will not initially  
> be popular, but I will put it out there in the spirit of  
> brainstorming.  It truly is a "lets turn lemons into lemonade"  
> suggestion.  I ask that everybody treat is as such.
>
> There is a sincere desire by some people to require ampersands to be  
> escaped, quote all attributes, close all open tags, get rid of tags  
> such as acronym, and to rid the internet of the scourge that is  
> presentational markup.
>
> At the same time, the discussion about "this is XHTML" vs "not it is  
> not" is showing no signs of going away.  This discussion even  
> persists when the alleged XHTML is served as text/html, does not  
> conform to any known schema or DTD, and even when is not well- 
> formed.  I think that we have an opportunity to change the topic.
>
> One possibility is to change the definition of the xmlns attribute  
> on the html tag from being a talisman to an opt-in to best practices.
>
> One downside of such an approach is that it would provide any means  
> for people who author content intended to be served as application/ 
> xhtml+xml to opt out.

Another downside is that many people who want to "opt in to best  
practices" would not agree that including the string 'xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/ 
"' in a text/html document is itself a best practice. If you want to  
propose multiple validator modes triggered by something in the  
document itself, I would suggest using something less potentially  
polarizing as the trigger. That would also address the downside that  
you stated.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 21:15:05 UTC