Re: ISSUE-4 - versioning/DOCTYPEs

Henri Sivonen, Mon, 17 May 2010 01:57:40 -0700 (PDT):
> "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU> wrote:

>> I think what Leif would like is some way to indicate in-document that
>> the document should be edited in polyglot mode so that all editors
>> would automatically do that.

+1 
 
> It's unclear to me what the use case is.
> 
> I'm aware of three use cases for polyglot documents:
> 
>  1) Serving [...]

>  2) Serving |...]

>  3) Serving [....]

> Leif, are there additional use cases that I'm missing?

Authoring.
Validation. Being able to offer validation quickly.
Avoiding other versioning systems from develop.
Note that I approach this not so much from the "are polyglot documents 
necessary" as from "are polyglot DOCTYPEs necessary".

  [... snippety ...]

> In general, I get a feeling that polyglot documents have more 
> intellectual appeal as a spec lawyering puzzle than they have 
> practical usefulness. I think the WG shouldn't fall into the trap of 
> chasing puzzle appeal instead of Solving Real Problems.
>
> P.S. What does all this have to do with "versioning"? And "DOCTYPEs" 
> in this context looks to me like a (bad) solution in search of a 
> problem...

Why does Mac OS X use use XML configuration files with Apple doctypes, 
if DOCTYPEs are useless?

HTML5 says that it doesn't define any doctypes for the XML version of 
HTML5. However, if we define a polyglot profile of XHTML5/HTML5, and if 
we deem that a specific doctype for such a profile is necessary, then 
we need to express that this DOCTYPE is permitted inside the text/html 
MIME type.

Note that what XHTML 1 in many ways were lacking, was a Appendix C 
Doctype.

It might be that the simplest would have been if XHTML would only be 
authored in .xhtml files. But that is extremely far from how things 
look like "in the wild".
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 00:35:04 UTC