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

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> > 
> > Try loading that in your favorite browsers and seeing what happens. 
> > Note that some of them display some bold text, while others do not. 
> > This is because the XML specification _does_ say that this document is 
> > invalid (that is not XML)
> 
> Can I ask that we be very careful in our language here? Invalid 
> documents can indeed be correct XML. A malformed document is not XML, 
> but an invalid document is XML. If it's not XML, then the XML definition 
> of validity can't even be applied. That distinction is really critical 
> to this discussion.

The key topic here is what the XML spec says should be done with content 
labeled (and thus processed) as XML, whether it is actually XML or not. By 
being vague about it, as the XML spec is, we end up with lack of 
interoperability on non-XML content labeled as XML.

For HTML, it is critical that we have interoperability on the 
non-conforming side of things, because studies show that in the region of 
90% of content labeled as HTML is non-conforming.

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

Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 22:31:23 UTC