Troubles Implementing Recommended Profile in Web Browsers

I've been working through what it would take as well as implementing
some of the parts of the recommended profile within WebKit.  I have
some "heartburn" with the difference between the "basic" and
"recommended" profile.  While it would seem to be important to
consider the recommended profile as the baseline for web browsers, I
don't think it will be well received by the various parties involved
in web browser development to "read and process" all external markup
declarations as the general tendency has been towards reducing
fetching "unnecessary" web resources.

As such, I looked at backing off from the recommended profile to a
lesser one where we don't require reading and processing external
markup declarations.  That brings me back down to the "basic" profile
and so I loose xinclude support.  As such, what I really want is the
"basic" profile with xinclude.

Obviously, the combinatorics of all the different possibilities
prohibits us from enumerating the different combinations.  I do
believe that the web browser is one of our important use cases and I
can't help but wonder if we've missed the mark.  Shouldn't the
recommended profile be the profile we expect the web browser to
implement?  If not, shouldn't there be one that has xinclude in it?

Also, since "reading and processing external markup declarations" is
essentially code words for "support DTDs", aren't we enshrining DTD
support in our "recommended profile"?  There are certainly many recent
days where I wish they would go away.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2011 23:20:48 UTC