Re: Backward-compatibility of text/html media type (ACTION-334, ACTION-364)

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Dan Connolly writes:

> On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 12:32 +0000, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
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>> Three points:
>> 
>>  1) As Julian says, DOCTYPE is not the only issue;
>> 
>>  2) Ian Hickson's response appears to me to confuse two separate
>>     issues -- we're not contesting that the HTML 5 spec can define
>>     conformance as it currently does -- previous HTML specs have
>>     eliminated features and ruled old documents non-conforming to the
>>     new spec.  What's at issue is whether or not such documents can be
>>     labelled 'text/html'.  Equating the class of "can be served as
>>     text/html" with the class "conforms to this spec." is what we are
>>     objecting to
>
> It is? I don't recall objecting to that.
>
> Given a suitable definition of "conforms to this spec", I think I'm
> OK with equating it with "can be served as text/html".

Sure, if the spec. is changed so that all past HTML docs conform to
the it, but as I said, I don't think that's a reasonable requirement
on this or any other spec.

My understanding of the discontinuity wrt the text/html media type
registration prose is this:

 1) Previous media type registrations for text/html have explicitly
    grandfathered in documents allowed by all earlier registrations of
    text/html;

 2) IETF rules for media type re-registrations requires that sort of
    grandfathering;

 3) The current draft media type registration section of the HTML 5
    spec. does _not_ contain any such grandfathering.

ht
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 15:07:10 UTC