Re: ISSUE-4 - versioning/DOCTYPEs

> 0) The problem: Some HTML5 ideologues think that XHTML should only be
> produced in documents with the .xhtml file suffix.

I suppose I am in that group. It comes down to: does HTML5 == XHTML5.
Put me down on the side that if people are writing these docs then
they are choosing one or the other intentionally.

Now take this, albeit ridiculous, example: all images end in .image
including gif, jpeg, png, etc. You can do this now, and many editors
will try and figure it out, usually correctly. But no guarantees. This
comparison breaks down since data stream inside, if you figure it out,
will not possibly match two formats. I'm ignoring that aspect for the
moment. The larger question here is: would people really want just one
file suffix?

Personally, I don't like that xhtml documents have <html> as their
root node. I think they should have <xhtml> as their root node, and
polyglot *documents* would not exist. I would leave the part of
polygot for the inside such that if you want to share a html snippet,
or want your site to be easily scraped, or easily imported without
further transforms into a feed, etc., that you can choose to do that.

However, while HTML5, X-HTML5, and polygot-HTML5 are all semantically
HTML5, they are not the "same". Just like PNG and GIF are both images,
they are not the "same".

As long as XHTML documents have <html> root nodes, confusion will
reign for years to come. Perhaps the best thing we can do is suggest
file ending for the different serializations:

.html
.xhtml
.phtml

Operating systems and editors are already optimized for the case of
different file endings / file types.

-steve--

Received on Sunday, 23 May 2010 16:47:05 UTC