Re: Publication of specifications as HTML5

On 19/08/2011 11:53, Karl Dubost wrote:
> Will XML well formed be enough for any xml consumer. It would be a
> low hanging fruit easy to achieve and that could satisfy everyone.

It depends why the "html4" requirement is there in the first place.

We've had the same problem with mathml forever, and I guess svg is the
same, in that we couldn't inline mathml examples into the normative
version of the spec. Which is sort of reasonable in early versions of
the spec: you shouldn't have to have a working zzz system before you can
read the spec to find out how to implement zzz.

Given that the "html5" syntax is largely defined to fall back gracefully
in legacy systems, I don't think there is really any need to restrict
the syntax (nor particularly to force the syntax to be xml. Yesterday
for example I experimented putting the full whatwg "complete" spec
through an xslt saxon pipeline to tex and thus to pdf and it only took
literally a few minutes to set up (using the validator.nu sax parser at
the front end) downloading the file took longer.

So I think the syntactic requirements to use an html4 or xhtml1 doctype
are not needed.

What may (or may not?) be needed are content model restrictions on using
or not using new "html5" structural features. Could a normative version
of the spec use canvas for example?

David

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Received on Friday, 19 August 2011 11:10:06 UTC