Lachlan Hunt wrote:see no problem with defining error handling for broken documents, but no need to break conformance with SGML in the process. HTML is an application of SGML, regardless of all the broken implementations and documents we currently have, and I don't want to see that changed.
An innocent question (no flamewar intended):
Of course not, I try not to flame. :-)
What is the benefit of having HTML defined as an application of SGML ?
So that it may be processed with SGML tools, and validated with an SGML based validator, and possibly even generated using XSLT. (I know XSLT can generate HTML4, but I don't know if it would be able to do HTML5 or not, even if it did remain an SGML application).
Even if it is decided that HTML 5 is not formally an application of SGML, it must at least remain fully compatible with SGML, and thus a conformant HTML 5 document must be a conformant SGML document. XHTML variants of HTML 5 must be a conformant XML document instead, though I noticed that is not the case with square brackets in ID attributes in section 3.7.2 of WF2 (are there no other character(s) than can be used instead?). So, I guess, there's already no hope of HTML 5 conforming to anything.
However, I would like to request that any defined error handling behaviour designed to cope with malformed documents that directly violates SGML, be made optional (but recommended) so that a user agent with a conforming SGML parser may still be conform to HTML 5.
-- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/ http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox
