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

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> The polyglot markup community has itself focused on clarifying the
> scope of Polyglot Markup. I am here thinking about Sam’s bug 19925,
> which seeks to emphasize that polyglot markup should be seen as an
> implementation of the robustness principle.[1]

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?

> Regarding Henri’s bug 20707,[2] then - the way I perceive it, it has
> very little focus on the robustness principle.

Of course it has no focus on the robustness principle, since a crucial
part of being polyglot is being XML and XML by design rejects the
robustness principle.

> To use the polyglot format means that the author stretches
> his or her efforts in order to do *more* than required by each "mono
> format", in order to meet *all* the ways the document could possibly be
> consumed.

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.

And sure enough, history repeats: The front page of your site (that
seems to be trying to be polyglot if the meta keywords are any
indication) cannot be consumed with an XML parser:
Fatal Error: reference to undeclared general entity “copy”

http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fmalform.no%2F&schema=http%3A%2F%2Fs.validator.nu%2Fxhtml5-rdfalite.rnc+http%3A%2F%2Fs.validator.nu%2Fhtml5%2Fassertions.sch+http%3A%2F%2Fc.validator.nu%2Fall%2F&parser=xml&laxtype=yes

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

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 21 January 2013 09:26:06 UTC