Re: HTML/XML TF Report glosses over Polyglot Markup

On 03/12/2012 14:26 , Sam Ruby wrote:
> On 12/03/2012 07:48 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> On 03/12/2012 12:02 , Henry S. Thompson wrote:
>>> Robin Berjon writes:
>>>> Saying "polyglot" here just doesn't help: very little real-world
>>>> content uses it. Note that the section clearly looks at polyglot and
>>>> gives a clear reason for not using it in this case.
>>>
>>> That depends on where you look.  I know of a number of companies whose
>>> products produced, by design, HTML-compatible XHTML, which we would
>>> now call polyglot, precisely because it gave them the ability to
>>> post-process with XML tools while at the same time serving to IE6
>>> clients confidently.  The parallel requirements aren't going away, and
>>> polyglot HTML5 will serve them very well.
>>
>> I know there is polyglot in the wild, I've used it in the past. But
>> there's a big difference between "some people use it" and "it's used
>> enough that one can build a useful strategy relying on it for arbitrary
>> content".
>
> Who sets the bar for "enough"?

You seem to be responding without appropriate context. If you read the 
beginning of the thread[0], this was about "2.1 How can an XML toolchain 
be used to consume HTML?" from the HTML/XML Task Force Report[1] that a 
few of us here were on a couple years ago.

So, faced with the task of processing HTML at large with an XML tool 
chain, I'm very much confident that "polyglot" is not the answer without 
needing anyone to set the bar for me. There certainly are tasks for 
which a 6+% success rate is "enough" (neutrino detection, say) but 
document processing generally isn't one of them.

This isn't to say that polyglot isn't useful in the right context — as I 
say above in the bit you quote I've used it myself. But it's not a 
solution to generally processing HTML with XML tools, which is good 
because it's also not something it set out to be. Hence my disagreement 
with Leif and Henry.

> If three people want to get together and collaborate, should the fact
> that some (and indeed many) may not want to participate be ground for
> stopping them?

No, but then again I never said otherwise.


[0] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Dec/0008.html
[1] http://www.w3.org/2010/html-xml/snapshot/report.html

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 3 December 2012 15:28:54 UTC