Re: Polyglot Markup Formal Objection Rationale

On 06/11/2012 10:52, Smylers wrote:
> Would anybody else object to the description parts of the Polyglot
> spec not being normative (so long as the definition is)?

What I think it should be (which isn't quite what it is now, probably)
is that the spec should be on REC track and should normatively define
the name of the profile/subset and normatively define that subset, but
that subset should be defined via _syntax_.

Any statements that documents that obey that syntax produce the same DOM
in text/html and application/xml parsing should not be normative as the
effect of parsing a given document (and thus whether the two results are
the same) is normatively defined elsewhere.

This is not much different from say the MathML profile for CSS

http://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-for-css/

which is a REC. That normatively defines a profile of MathML as
documents that validate against a given dtd.

The rationale for that subset is that documents keeping to it may be
plausibly rendered just using CSS rather than a full MathML system,
however there is not a normative requirement (in that document) that any
particular CSS is used or works as intended.

Defining "MathML for CSS" as "that bit of MathML that can be rendered by
css", is a design aim but not a useful definition for authoring systems
to target, they need a specific syntax profile.

The same is true of polyglot. For systems that want to generate that
form) without needing to say here whether it is a good or bad idea to do
so) a normative syntax profile is what is required, not the motivation
that compatible DOM are produced.

David



________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2012 12:21:58 UTC