Re: NU’s polyglot possibilities (Was: The non-polyglot elephant in the room)

Alex Russell, Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:11:56 -0500:

> I'm honestly trying to understand the real-world harm in giving up on
> polyglot.

The real world harm is that it would make the W3C look very 
paternalistic. Can the W3C afford that?  

If you read the HTML5 specification from end to end, you will find that 
its Technical Architecture looks as follows:

 * HTML5 defines a shared vocabulary for XHTML and HTML
 * HTML5 makes all its features serializable as XML
 * HTML5 uses the same namespace for HTMl and XHTMl
 * HTML5 has the same best practice encoding (UTF-8)
 * HTML5 follows many other strategies for making it
   easy to switch to/from XHTML/HTML - polyglot
   markup would simply be the simplest.
   (An example is how XHTML5 permits <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
   *only* to make it simpler to switch between XML/HTML.)
 * HTML5 supports the same "XML islands" (<svg>, <mathml> etc)
   in both serializations.
 * HTML5 allows xml:lang in text/html

and so and so forth.

So everything is there. It is ready. The fruit is very low. And so, if 
W3C were to say: Don't pick it! Then its paternalistic.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 25 January 2013 22:38:10 UTC