Re: Notes on the draft polyglot document Polyglot document

On 06/09/2010 01:35 PM, James Graham wrote:
> On 06/09/2010 01:21 PM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>> The TAG has reviewed the editor's draft "HTML/XHTML Compatibility
>> Authoring Guidelines"
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-xhtml-author-guide/html-xhtml-authoring-guide.html
>>
>>
>>
> as retreived 2010-06-09 CVS rev 1.14
>> We welcome this effort and have a few suggestions as follows.
>>
>> 1. The document should be couched as a specification. It specifies a
>> set of documents, defined by various constraints, most (though not
>> all, because of the constraints on what scripts do) of which can be
>> checked by a validator. (This is useful spec, even though of course
>> there are many types of document which are not exactly as defined
>> which also have interesting properties).
>
> I don't think it makes sense to make this document normative on that
> basis. The allowed content of a polyglot document is purely inferred
> from other, already normative, texts. Giving the same status to the
> underlying rules and the inferred rules seems like a recipe for trouble
> since one is effectively defining the same thing in multiple places.
>

Hmm, so this is more complex than I first thought, since there are also 
judgment calls about whether features are considered compatible enough 
to be "polyglot". Nevertheless I would prefer that there is a clear 
division between the actual rules that define what the term "polyglot" 
means (e.g. DOM must be identical when processed by a HTML or XHTML 
parser) and the consequences of those rules (e.g. tag names must be in 
canonical case).