[whatwg] Re: Doctype FPI

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Malcolm Rowe wrote:
>
> Given that the specifications *are* being developed (and ratified?)
> independantly, it's reasonable that we'd see documents developed using
> only one of the WHATWG specifications, so I don't see that a single FPI
> would work here.

True.


> I don't think it's unreasonable that WA1 might require WF2, and that WC1
> might require WA1, and so I don't think that we'd need all combinations.

WF2 and WC1 should be independent. WA1 might well depend on WF2.


> However, if we're going to submit these as individual extensions to
> HTML, with some time occurring between each one, rather than produce a
> single monolithic HTML5 spec and DTD, I think we need to allow people to
> specify which 'version' of HTML they're using.

The more I think about this, the more I really think we should just have
one DTD, "Generic HTML", that allows any tag name, so long as the content
is well-formed. It would have to handle the optional elements, but other
than that it would be equivalent to XML well-formedness checking.

Then, assuming we don't ever introduce elements with optional tags (which
I highly doubt we will), we never need to update the DTD again.

(Before people say "but then we wouldn't catch the syntax errors like
putting a <foo> inside a <bar>!", let me remind you that DTDs are
completely inadequate for the task of describing the actual syntax
requirements of HTML, let alone Web Forms 2.0.)

-- 
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