Re: HTML5 and XHTML2 combined (a new approach)

2009/1/22 Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>

> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> >
> > Actually, only http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/ can be considered HTML5 (a
> > vocabulary and associated api for (X)HTML): the other are not dependent
> > or related to HTML (the markup language), although implemented together,
> > and are in scope of Web Applications WG (and are developed there).
>
> Well by that definition, any spec is "monolithic", then, so Mark's slur
> is meaningless.
>

No: there are "monolithic" specs, that try to define everything "from
producer to consumer", and spec that address very specific use case and
technologies. HTML5 is "monolithic" in that sense, behavior in the middle of
web page processing, generation, etc. is very difficult to modify. XHTML2 is
"modularized": a collection of "specific" specs (each XHTML module could be
considered an independent specification, besides of W3C Process Document)
that integrate together.

>
> > Even the fact that you consider WebWorkers or XMLHttpRequest (or even
> > the WebSocket protocol) as part of HTML5 is against modularity and
> > extensibility: they're independent technologies with different use
> > cases, conformance requirements and designs. Why shouldn't I be able to
> > use WebSocket from a C++ application? Or use XMLHttpRequest with
> > image/png (XHR2 of course)? Or implemnt Selectors API in a Gnome's
> > LibXML2?
>
> You can use HTML5 from a C++ application (most Web browsers do!). And the
> HTML5 APIs and features (e.g. <iframe>) can be used with image/png. And
> you could implement HTML5's getElementsByClassName() feature in libxml2
> just like the Selectors API.
>

You (I hope not willfully) ignored my point: can I use what you called
"HTML5 related" technologies without implementing HTML5? Can I use
WebSockets using carefully crafted byte streams and POSIX sockets api? Can I
use XMLHttpRequest to fetch an image/png (or any other type of data),
ignoring the Content-Type sniffing (because both Apache and IIS
automatically append a Content-Type for static content, even if just
application/octet-stream), the text/html parsing, the responseXML
implementing HTMLDocument interface, etc.? Can I put a method called
"querySelectorsAll", that processes a CSS Selectors and fetches a DOM
NodeList inside LibXML2, in an application that has nothing to do with HTML
(or web in general), but happens to like Selectors more than XPath?
Yes, of course I can. This is modularization.


Giovanni