ISSUE-4 - versioning/DOCTYPEs

The following are some initial ideas for another Change Proposal for 
ISSUE-4.

Firstly, I think the versioning issue should be solved in the 
"polyglot" and MIME space. In that regard, HTML5 says [1]

]] XML documents may contain a DOCTYPE if desired, but this is not 
required to conform to this specification. This specification does not 
define a public or system identifier, nor provide a format DTD. [[

This statement is an opening for XHTML based specs to create DOCTYPEs 
that are "XHTML5 DOCTYPEs". 

The question then becomes whether such XHTML5 DOCTYPEs should be 
permitted served as 'text/html'. It seems that many in this group agree 
that this should be permitted documents specifications that cover 
polyglot documents - documents which can be served as both text/html 
and as XHTML. 

Example of a need: Gecko/Mozilla based WYSIWYG editors KompoZer, NVU 
and BlueGriffon do not respect a document's XHTML syntax unless there 
is a specific XHTML DOCTYPE. XHTML5 doesn't have a specific XHTML 
doctype (yet). Yes, the authoring guidelines for polyglot documents 
requires the literal case-sensitive string <!DOCTYPE html>, because it 
is only this version that is XHTML compatible. But still, an editor can 
only operate with a private decision to treat such a doctype as an 
XHTML syntax triggering DOCTYPE.  So, for instance, if one tries the 
'XHTML 1.1+MathML 2.0+SVG 1.1' DOCTYPE, which covers a document type 
which is not too different from XHTML5, then KompoZer appears to handle 
the XHTML syntax fine. Other editors have a similar need know what kind 
of syntax it is dealing with.

One could say that XHTML5 specifications are allowed to create DOCTYPEs 
for use in text/html, whether SGML based or otherwise, as long as it is 
clear that the purpose with the DOCTYPEs fullfills all or some of these:

a) the parser purpose in text/html mode, 
   is to bring text/html browsers in strict mode
b) the tool purpose is to offer document creation 
   support (tool compatibility)
c) the serving purpose is to create a polyglot spec
   (can be served as text/html or xhtml)
d) validation (just check how fast the RDFa group 
   is able to offer validation!)
e) other restrictions?

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-xhtml-syntax#the-xhtml-syntax
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 13 May 2010 14:43:28 UTC