Re: The non-polyglot elephant in the room

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 11:15 PM, David Sheets <kosmo.zb@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was under the impression that an explicit goal of standardizing the
> HTML5 parser was so that HTML consumers and producers could rely on a
> de jure interpretation of nonsensical markup.

Consumers, yes. Logically, it will eventually mean that producers can,
too, but we’ve tried to avoid advertising that.

> While many consider
> XML's restrictions nonsensical, it is prima facie absurd that
> champions of HTML5's apologetic parser refuse to consider the subset
> of HTML5 that is also valid XHTML5 as clearly important to a
> population of authors.

I don’t think it’s absurd for HTML parser champions to be opposed to
polyglot, since championing HTML parsing involves asking people to
possess an HTML parser (everyone already has an XML parser). If you
possess an HTML parser and an XML parser, you don’t need polyglot. If
you  get text/html, you use the HTML parser. If you get
application/xhtml+xml, you use the XML parser.

> >From my perspective, anti-polyglot proponents advocate global
> text/html interpretation of nearly everything *except* XHTML.

I’m advocating for text/html interpretation of text/html *only*. I am
advocating against text/html interpretation of application/xhtml+xml
and vice versa.

> XHTML is
> stricter than HTML and polyglot serializations *should* exist for any
> DOM

Impossible in the general case without breaking backwards
compatibility of either HTML or XML. I.e. not worth the trouble.

> I am genuinely confused by arguments which appear to encourage liberal
> emission and deride conservative emission.

Do you consider “valid HTML for text/html and valid XHTML for
application/xhtml+xml” “liberal”?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 07:03:51 UTC