Re: Design goal regarding HTML5

On Thu, 2012-09-06 at 12:58 +0100, Stephen D Green wrote:
> [...]

>  MicroXML
> could allow parsers to preserve in its data model whether the markup
> included
> an empty element as <abc/> or as <abc></abc> or 2) maybe HTML would start
> to treat them as equivalent.

Web browsers have to continue to interpret existing content in the same
way. The point of HTML 5 was to document current behaviour.

HTML cannot, and will not be able to in the forseeable future, treat
<br></br> as the same as <br>, because of existing content that assumes
they are different.

Similarly, we can't change XML in ways that would break either existing
content or existing implementations - we've tried...

So MicroXML has to work with the world as it is, not with the world as
we'd like it to become...

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Saturday, 8 September 2012 21:28:34 UTC