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

On Nov 18, 2008, at 8:13 AM, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>> (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.)
>
> Sadly this isn't true. For instance, in data mining, "Applications  
> and tools that process HTML and XHTML documents for reasons other  
> than to either render the documents or check them for conformance  
> should act in accordance to the semantics of the documents that they  
> process."
>
> This statement indicates an underlying belief that semantics are  
> interoperable and that a document can in fact be said to have a  
> particular set of semantics which can be shared and transferred  
> between independent parties.
>
> Of course, I expect most data mining tools to more or less ignore  
> this statement and infer whatever set of semantics they need from  
> the syntax.

RFC2119 SHOULD means the requirement does not apply if there is any  
significant reason to do otherwise. For a search engine for instance,  
the fact that better results can be produced by often ignoring defined  
semantics would be a good enough reason.

  - Maciej