[whatwg] DTD for checking future HTML vocabulary evolution

Hi,

my name is Marcus Reichardt and last week I gave a talk at the XML
Prague conference about HTML (the version that W3C has recently
published based on your work here) from a markup language perspective.

I just wanted to inform you that there's now an initial SGML DTD
available for HTML (linked from http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html)
which can be used for checking future additions/changes to HTML. In my
talk/paper I make a point about what I consider an unintended
consequence of a relatively recent change to the content model for the
datalist element (the "datalist flaw"), and that I think HTML5's
grammar presentation leads to this kind of issues. Specifically, I'm
seeing an issue with enumerating all the elements implicitly
terminating a parent element for each element individually, and that
this practice puts an unnecessary burden on ongoing maintenance of the
HTML grammar. I think the intent of rules for end-element omission and
other grammar rules is better (and much more succinctly) expressed in
DTD grammar rules.

So if you can see value in an automated check of a modified HTML
vocabulary, please feel free to make use of the DTD, or even
contribute to it. A fix to a piece of broken table markup in the
specification text found using the DTD has already made its way into
the spec text eg.
https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/6e305c457e42276bf275b8432302a32c929b0eb8).

I'll be glad about any feedback, be it positive and negative.

Received on Monday, 13 February 2017 11:35:23 UTC