[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> If every conformance checker has to implement their own, there's more 
> chance they some of them will make mistakes, and each end up with 
> differing DOCTYPES.  If that happens, then chances are each validator 
> would give differing results, which is even more confusing and would 
> result in no-one validating at all!  If there is only one official 
> DOCTYPE, then at least all validators would have a chance of giving 
> identical results, and mistakes can be managed from one place by filing 
> errata for it, and updating it as necessary.

The problem with doctypes is they tie the document to one particular 
type of validation and one particular implementation of the validation 
constraints. Experience shows that different, competing implementations 
of a spec has a higher probability of uncovering bugs and weaknesses in 
the spec and in each other, than a single canonical implementation.

Since current browsers dont use DTD validation, the adherence to a 
single canonical DTD does not guarantee that the document will be parsed 
correctly by the intended audience anyway.

I believe that a document should only declare its adherence to a spec, 
and then different tools should be allowed to check this adherence using 
various methods, the same way that different browsers (presumably) uses 
different parsers to parse the document.

Olav Junker Kj?r

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 04:54:31 UTC