Re: HTML/XML TF Report glosses over Polyglot Markup

On 12/04/2012 09:29 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I think it’s fine for 3 people to participate and create a coding
> style for their blogs[1] that suits their use of non-conforming
> parsers and publish the coding style on their blogs. Publishing such a
> house style as a W3C REC will generate another decade of
> http://xkcd.com/386/ like the infamous Appendix C did for the previous
> decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch#Words_that_may_introduce_bias

And I will also repeat that it is not "their use" that is of concern here.

> [1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19925 together with
> http://intertwingly.net/blog/2012/11/09/In-defence-of-Polyglot suggest
> the goals of the polyglot guide might morph as the goals of the coding
> style on intertwingly.net shift from catering to both to IE8 and
> browsers that required XHTML for inline SVG (goal obsoleted by the
> SVG-in-text/html capabilities of IE9 and of browser that have
> HTML5-compliant parsers) to making the markup work in the
> HTML5-incompliant *HTML* parser of libxml2. (It’s worth noting that
> one could already use a compliant HTML parser to convert HTML to XHTML
> and then use libxml2’s *XML* parser. For example, the Validator.nu
> HTML Parser comes with a sample tool called
> nu.validator.htmlparser.tools.HTML2XML .)

This continues to look at it solely from a implementors perspective.

Implementer of tools continue to see nothing wrong with the perspective 
of "people produce bad data, so I must compensate".

I only ask that people give the same consideration to authors. 
Specifically, "people use bad tools, so I must compensate".

While it is indeed worth nothing that it is theoretically possible for 
people to insert Validator.nu into lightweight scripts written using 
PHP, Ruby and other languages, it is also worth nothing that few if any 
such tool writers have done so.  Nor has any evidence been prodded that 
this is changing.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2012 15:10:51 UTC