Re: TAG ACTION-407 -- text/html media type and legacy

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> 
> In section 12.1 [1]
> 
> Add
> 
>     *Introduction and background*
> 
>       HTML has been in use in the World Wide Web information
>       infrastructure since 1990, and specified in various informal
>       documents.  The text/html media type was first officially
>       defined by the IETF HTML working group in 1995 in [HTML20].
> 
>       Subsequent standardization work at the W3C relevant to this
>       media type was published in [HTML32], [HTML40] and [HTML401].
> 
>       This registration updates [RFC2854] by identifying this
>       specification as the relevant specification, without ruling out
>       continued use of the text/html media type for older documents.
> 
> and replace
> 
>     *Interoperability considerations:*
>         Rules for processing both conforming and non-conforming
>         content are defined in this specification.
>     *Published specification:*
>         This document is the relevant specification. Labeling a
>         resource with the text/html type asserts that the resource is
>         an HTML document using the HTML syntax.
> 
> with
> 
>     *Interoperability considerations:*
> 
>         This specification defines rules for processing not only
>         conforming also non-conforming documents, including those
>         which conform to the early specifications listed above.
> 
>     *Published specification:*
> 
>         This document is the relevant specification. Labeling a
>         document with the text/html type asserts that the document is
>         a member of the HTML family, as defined by this specification
>         or those listed above [ref Introduction and background], and
>         licenses its interpretation according to this specification.

To help evaluate the above suggestion, could I ask for a brief summary of 
the problems that the above changes are intended to address?

(The changes above seem mostly editorial, so the right process in the 
HTMLWG to handle these changes is probably just to file a bug for each of 
the three changes with a brief explanation of the problem that led to the 
request -- I don't forsee any particular problem with these.)

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

Received on Thursday, 15 April 2010 18:54:21 UTC