- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:48:29 -0800
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, "Michael(tm) Smith" <mike@w3.org>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, David Orchard <orchard@pacificspirit.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, www-tag@w3.org
Ian Hickson wrote: > On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Elliotte Harold wrote: >> I'm not so sure. I'm not aware of any current specs that attempt to >> prescribe the handling of a byte stream received over HTTP > > Off the top of my head: CSS, PNG, text/plain, XML. > > Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, all of those basically have the > same kinds of requirements as HTML5, specifically how to determine the > encoding, how to obtain meaning from bytes using that encoding, etc. > "Handling" I suppose is a vague term, but XML and text/plain describe neither rendering, semantics, nor behavior. They say absolutely nothing about what a processor should or must do with any given byte stream or what meaning it infers to those bytes. They describe syntax, nothing more. CSS and PNG describe rendering--that's their whole purpose--but not behavior. HTML 5 attempts to prescribe almost everything. It is far more demanding and less flexible than previous specs. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Refactoring HTML Just Published! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 10:49:07 UTC