Re: Comments on HTML WG face to face meetings in France Oct 08

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> 
> So, let's look at this step by step.

Thank you. I agree with your conclusions (namely, that it is undefined). 
That was my point; that none of the specifications in the current stack 
actually define this case (Noah, I believe, implied that this _was_ 
defined somewhere). IMHO, if we want interoperability, we have to define 
cases like this (especially considering that the majority of content is 
invalid, so punting on handling of invalid content leaves out most of the 
content). This is why HTML5 is so detailed.


Incidentally, do you know if the current specs define how a user agent is 
to handle the following bytes if they are received by the client _before_ 
the client knows if there are any more bytes?

   <?xml-stylesheet href="data:text/css,*{font-weight:bold}"?>
   <root>text <outer>outer <inner>inner</outer>

I haven't been able to find where the XML spec defines how to process such 
a document -- it's not strictly an "XML document" since it isn't 
well-formed, but it might become well-formed if the next few bytes are 
"</root>", or it might become definitely not well-formed if, say, there 
are no more bytes. Surely the processing of the earlier part of the 
document doesn't change based on later parts of the document. Indeed in 
many applications, it couldn't change.

This kind of detail is something that we really need from specifications 
for the Web. This is the motivation behind a lot of the nitty gritty of 
the HTML5 spec.


> So it appears to me that if you (or Boris) have a grievance, it is with 
> the CSS and/or the XML Stylesheet specs, not the XML spec.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the XML spec to define this once instead 
of having this defined in CSS, DOM, XHR, SVG, MathML, and every other spec 
that uses XML and is to be implemented in a user agent that needs 
interoperability even with the case of non-XML documents labeled as XML?


My point isn't that we should or should not change XML; I'm just trying to 
explain why HTML5 is as detailed as it is.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2008 01:23:14 UTC