- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:34:24 -0800
- To: elharo@metalab.unc.edu
- Cc: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
On Nov 18, 2008, at 5:18 AM, Elliotte Harold wrote: > Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > >> It sounds like, based on your statements, there would be no >> specification or set of specifications that define how Boris's >> document should be processed, even if it were syntactically correct >> XML. We certainly want to avoid HTML being underspecified in this >> way. > > Exactly. There SHOULD be specifications that define how HTML 5 MAY > be processed for certain use cases. However this is very different > from specifying how HTML SHOULD or MUST be processed. As a browser implementor, I would like a specification, not a serving suggestion. In other words, a document that says how an interactive HTML user agent (what we commonly call "a browser") MUST process HTML, just as router vendors want specs that define how they MUST process IP packets, and compiler vendors want specs that define how they MUST process C++ source files. Doesn't HTML deserve to be taken just as seriously? (Of course, many of the conformance criteria relevant to mainstream browsers won't apply to other kinds of software. Fortunately, HTML5 defines a number of conformance classes: <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#conformance-requirements >. The classes "data mining tool" and "markup generator" cover between them any tool that takes HTML as input or output, and are free of browser-specific concerns.) Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 14:42:03 UTC