Re: TAG Decision on Rescinding the request to the HTML WG to develop a polyglot guide

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> When you say “[t]he polyglot markup community” and say you are
> thinking about bug 19925, do I understand correctly (from looking at
> who says what in the comments of that bug) that the “[t]he polyglot
> markup community” consists of you and Sam?
> 

Please, let's not stifle debate on this issue based on the logical
fallacy that a small number of advocates indicates a lack of interest.
While I've been afk for a month and have just caught up on this thread,
had I been following it in real time I would not have seen the need to
post, as Leif, Daniel, and Larry have eloquently expressed most every
point which concerns me.

Since I've posted on this issue here before, more than once, I'm now
wondering if I need to bump every thread with a "+1" to cement my
status as the third member of the polyglot community?

> 
> That’s a restatement (possibly with slightly different wording) of
> Appendix C advocacy of old. We know how that turned out: People toiled
> in order to support the theoretical case of someone somewhere
> consuming their content using an XML parser—only to always fail due to
> one error or another that XML treats as fatal. And, hence, people out
> there who really tried to consume Web content used something like John
> Cowan’s TagSoup rendering the authors’ Appendix C exercise to assist
> them moot.
> 

Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it.  But the way I remember
it, is XHTML "failed" on the Web primarily due to the dominant browser's
failure to support application/xhtml+xml until recently.  Now that it
does, there's truly more than one way to skin a cat on the Web, so it
seems senseless to preclude one of those ways based on a historical case
which has ceased to exist, now that I finally see XSLT turning up in my
browser on real-world sites instead of just my own 2006-vintage demo.

> 
> When 50% of the polyglot markup community itself can’t get it right,
> why bother?
> 

This is not the attitude the developer community likes to see from a
TAG member.  Apparently I need to make this point, again:  If there was
no interest in polyglot, there would be no HTML parser in libxml2; its
presence, and widespread use if xsl-list is any indication, indicates
otherwise.

-Eric

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2013 22:36:45 UTC