Re: Statement why the Polyglot doc should be informative

Henri Sivonen, Fri, 9 Nov 2012 15:25:41 +0200:
> 
http://www.w3.org/mid/CAJQvAufUBZ0aYhkPjeW4vhG9W7qUF8DymTLO8WX6gKzb5YoSfA@mail.gmail.com

> 
> Exhibit A about confusion: “By doing this, your documents will almost
> assuredly be better structured and of higher quality, yet still be
> able to be treated as HTML5.”
> (http://www.sitepoint.com/have-you-considered-polyglot-markup/)

May be that sentence could be refined. But I wholeheartedly subscribe 
to the spirit of it. Feel free to explain why that is a sign of 
"confusion". 

> Exhibit B about confusion:
> http://intertwingly.net/blog/2012/11/09/In-defence-of-Polyglot

> conflates the problem of generating output that works with incompliant
> HTML consumers with polyglotness.

Well, there is some truth to the claim that HTML-compatible XHTML can 
overcome difficulties in incompliant HTML-consumers. 

> To keep truth in advertising, a profile that documents a set of
> restrictions preferred by a group of polyglot enthusiasts should not
> be labeled so that it looks like it's documenting the subset of HTML
> that is also XHTML with the same semantics. For example, if you want
> to define a profile that is successfully consumed by the HTML parser
> of libxml2, I think you should design the profile by studying the
> behaviors of the HTML parser in libxml2 and label the profile
> something like “libxml2-compatible HTML profile”

Is there a concrete reason to mention libxml2? 

If I could wish for things, then I think <meta http-equiv=Content-Type 
content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/> should be permitted in XHTML5, - 
and not only <meta charset="UTF-8"/>. That would increase the 
capability of legacy content producers to create more or less polyglot 
markup. May be I should file a bug?

> instead of drawing
> conclusions from the definitions of HTML and XHTML and labeling the
> result “polyglot”.

The result is polyglot. So one could ask why shouldn't one label it so? 
But of course we could bikeshed about another name.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 9 November 2012 13:52:49 UTC