Browsers and profiles

Perhaps I'm just feeling grumpy today...

It strikes me that the browser case is the important use case for the
processor profiles document. Tools built on top of real XML parsers
can almost all be persuaded to do the modest and/or recommended
profiles. So there's definitely value in having the document for other
XML specs, but it probably matters less what it actually says for
those cases because they're mostly flexible.

If we accept that browsers aren't going to change, they're never going
to do the modest or recommended profiles.

So we've produced a document that recommends the impossible. That
seems ... unhelpful.

I have an inflamatory proposal.

Rename the "recommended" profile to "comprehensive"
Rename the "basic" profile to "recommended".
Drop the "modest" profile into the bit bucket.

So we have minimal, recommended, and comprehensive. Three profiles
instead of four and better names. The recommended profile doesn't do
what we might have hoped, but it does what the browsers do (or might
be persuaded to do) so most folks will think that the browsers are
doing the recommended thing and that's nice.

Us old timers who still sometimes use external subsets ought to drag
our lazy selves into the twenty-first century and just stop.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
Lead Engineer
MarkLogic Corporation
www.marklogic.com