- From: Leons Petrazickis <leons.petrazickis@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:57:06 -0500
On 11/30/06, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net> wrote: > On 11/30/06, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at opera.com> wrote: > > > > It has to allow two authoring syntaxes. One HTML and one XML. I thought we > > were past that discussion? > > The sense I am gathering is that the proposal is not obviously insane, and > in fact is a bit novel in that such a narrowly scoped adoption of XML syntax > -- i.e., only to the extent that it both reflects the web as widely > practiced and only to the extent that doing such does not introduce > ambiguity into the grammar -- had not been considered before. > > In any case, I plan to proceed on the assumption that it is worth my time to > flesh out the proposal a bit more. The next iteration is likely to also > contain thoughts on extensibility and namespaces. Like this proposal was, > my intent is that that proposal too will also take great care to only be > minimally invasive. So far, the proposal is to have two syntaxes: 1) HTML5 - Backwards-compatible text/html syntax that allows trailing slashes on always-empty elements. 2) XHTML5 - Full XML syntax with the proper mime type. I am not sure where extensibility and namespaces would fit into that. Perhaps they should be proposed independently of this. Again, early adopters of CSS, validation, and semantic mark-up were told a story. That story said that maintainability=>no formatting in HTML=>CSS=>XHTML=>trailing backslashes on empty elements. That's not true, but quibbling nets few converts. If we make trailing backslashes invalid, then every bug report we file will say: - Remove trailing backslashes. You can't serve XHTML like this. That will invariably be rejected. If we keep them valid on always-empty elements, then it'll be much nicer: - HTML5 is the new hot thing. You shouldn't be serving XHTML as text/html anyways. Switch doctypes, revalidate, and iteratively improve markup It's much easier to gain acceptance, agreement, buy-in, consensus on the latter. The validation errors they'll see will actually help them with browser compatibility. -- Leons Petrazickis
Received on Thursday, 30 November 2006 07:57:06 UTC