- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:39:51 +0200
- To: Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Cc: WHATWG List <whatwg@whatwg.org>, W3C HTML <www-html@w3.org>
On Oct 30, 2006, at 01:32, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells wrote: > Henri Sivonen wrote: > >> Does the W3C now accept that HTML is not in practice an >> application of SGML? > > Why do you believe this to be important, Henri ? HTML was not an application of SGML to begin with. It was inspired by SGML and in the beginning HTML parsers were not expected to be full SGML systems. (For evidence, see http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf- iiir-html-01.txt .) For the last decade, HTML specs have claimed that HTML is an application of SGML, but this has failed to have an impact on the reality of browsers, which should indicate that insisting on SGML has utterly failed. The spec pretending that HTML is an application of SGML is not a good idea, because 1) HTML specs should document what needs to be implemented in order to interoperate with other HTML UAs. Saying something significantly different from what implementors need to know is not helpful. 2) The complexity of SGML is not needed. Pretending that HTML is an application of SGML server no practical purpose. 3) It is not useful that quality assurance tools pretend that it is SGML when this distances quality assurance tools from practical needs. 4) Limitations of DTDs shouldn't cause a denial of interoperably implemented features. For example, it is useless to pretend that <embed> doesn't exist just because it doesn't fit together with DTDs. >> Does the W3C now subscribe to the view that the engines that >> matter the most are Gecko, Presto, Trident and WebKit and if they >> interoperate, their common behavior is what gets specified? > > Is Internet Explorer based on any of these engines ? Yes: Trident. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 30 October 2006 09:13:23 UTC