Re: Making all elements and attributes that contain hyphens valid

On 10/03/2013 03:05 AM, Michael[tm] Smith wrote:
>
> We don't want to make it harder for authors to know when they have
> documents that contain names which aren't part of any standard, and we
> don't want to make it harder for authors to catch misspelled attribute
> names, and we don't want authors to end up being even further limited in
> the choice of tools they can use -- limited to only using tools that are
> complex enough to understand all the magic we're introducing.

[chair hat off]

As implementer of a validator for another set of markup languages (Atom, 
RSSes), my thoughts match Mike's though I end up with a slightly 
different conclusion.

WebComponents defines a mechanism by which new elements may be minted. 
So any name containing a hyphen may potentially be valid.  A page should 
only be validate without messages if such a name was actually minted, 
and can be verified as being used correctly.

Note that I said "validate without message", not "considered valid".

For comparison, here is the relevant section in the RFC for Atom:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#section-6.4

Here are the corresponding feedvalidator test cases:

https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/tree/master/testcases/atom/6.4

Here is the results of validation:

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedvalidator.org%2Ftestcases%2Fatom%2F6.4%2Fextension-unknown-noerror.xml

Here is the help message produced:

http://feedvalidator.org/docs/warning/UnknownNamespace.html

In the case of Web Components, this is made more complicated because 
templates can be defined in a separately fetched template page.  An HTML 
validator would need to make a choice as to whether or not it follows 
such imports.  But the end result is the same: the only thing this 
choice would affect is the wording of the warning message and help.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Thursday, 3 October 2013 11:21:59 UTC