- From: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 11:33:47 +0000
- To: public-html@w3.org
Alex Russell writes: > I find myself asking (without an obvious answer): who benefits from > the creation of polyglot documents? I can see an advantage of the creating a snippet as polyglot HTML/XHTML. For example if you want to distribute a badge or banner or status widget or search form or something that others can paste into their sites, it's simpler if you can just offer a single snippet which will work fine when pasted into either an HTML or an XHTML document. However: * The number of sites served as XHTML is so small that this may not be worth bothering with. * This scenario doesn't involve an entire document being polyglot. So if we wanted to support it we'd actually need a spec and validator for polyglot snippets, rather than entire documents. * You can't quite get this right in all detail anyway. For example, suppose your snippet includes a <table>, and you want it to be styled by an enclosing site's style-sheet to match other <table>-s on the site. Do you include <tbody> tags or not? If the enclosing site is XHTML then its styles may depend on either the presence of or the absence of <tbody> elements. In order to match your snippet needs to do the same -- but obviously you can't produce a single snippet which both includes and omits <tbody> tags, so you can't cover both possibilities anyway. Smylers -- http://twitter.com/Smylers2
Received on Saturday, 26 January 2013 16:32:19 UTC