Re: adding a note to 4.3.10.1 Creating an outline

Hi Jason,

Jason Kiss <jason@accessibleculture.org>, 2014-02-28 13:49 +1300:

> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> wrote:
> > However, there is already a JavaScript library that follows the spec to
> > provide an "HTML5Outline(element)" method that returns an outline object
> > for a subtree or whole document -- depending on what element you give it --
> > (and as a bonus an outline.asHTML convenience method to generate an HTML
> > representation of an outline) -
> >
> >   https://code.google.com/p/h5o/
> >
> > So I'd like for the spec to actually explicitly define something like that
> > HTML5Outline(element) method, or an element.createOutline or whatever name.
> > But so far Hixie's not been keen on adding such a createOutline method to
> > the spec, and nobody else has yet specced anything for it. So here we are.
> 
> A year ago, it was clear that the h5o script (and gsnedder's outliner
> [1]) interpreted the outline algorithm differently from how the w3c's
> dev validator did [2].

That's because h5o and gesnedders outliner are not completely conforming to
the spec. Because at the time I added the outline support to the validator,
it conformed to the spec. (Hixie has since made some changes to the spec so
there are now some cases where the validator feature doesn't conform. But I'm
planning on updating it to make it conform to what's in the current spec.)

> Unless something's changed, I'm assuming that
> things are much the same and the correct interpretation of the
> algorithm (as it was intended) remains ambiguous.

No, the spec is not ambiguous as far as I can see. If anybody finds it
ambiguous, they should file a bug report.

> As such, I think explicitly defining a formal method for doing so is a
> good idea, and gets my vote.
> 
> [1] http://gsnedders.html5.org/outliner/
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2013Apr/0003.html

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike

Received on Friday, 28 February 2014 01:14:00 UTC