[Bug 11064] New: unstated requirement to be valid.

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11064

           Summary: unstated requirement to be valid.
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: Windows NT
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guide (ed: Eliot
                    Graff)
        AssignedTo: eliotgra@microsoft.com
        ReportedBy: davidc@nag.co.uk
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org,
                    public-html@w3.org, eliotgra@microsoft.com


There is an implicit requirement in the document that in order to comply with
polyglot markup the document must be valid to some DTD. If the document is not
valid (or not well formed) then the DOMs generated by the html and xml parsers
would differ in many ways not listed here, due to Adoption Agency Agency
algorithm, and other special case handling done by the html parser.

On the other hand, if the there was an explicit requirement in the
specification that the document be conformant to some specified xml dtd
matching html+mathml+svg then many parts of the document could be removed.

* most of section 4 would be redundant (eg the document is not well formed XML
if <!DOCTYPE is lowercase

* all of section 5 would be redundant given a suitable xml dtd

* 6.1 would be redundant if the xhtml dtd did not allow tr as a child of table
and instead required tbody (this would be a change from xhtml1 dtd, but in line
with other changes needed for html5)

6.2 and 6.3  could be removed

7.1 could be removed

8 could be removed if the dtd that was referenced at the start did not define
the html/mathml entities, as then any use of such an entity would render the
document not well formed.



Given the constraints that the doctype should preferably be just 
<!DOCTYPE html>
some care in the wording has to be used if there were a requirement that the
document be valid to a particular dtd, however it is easy enough to say this in
words or you could say that there was an implied xml catalog that substituted
the required dtd whatever dtd was specified in the doctype declaration. However
I think that the document would be a lot more accurate (and easier to keep in
line with multiple versions of svg) if requirements such as the right case of
element and attribute names were deferred to a machine check-able xml dtd
rather than being in fragile manually maintained lists in the text of a
specification.

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Received on Friday, 15 October 2010 09:02:17 UTC