[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

[Jim Ley]

On Apr 6, 2005 3:41 PM, Olav Junker Kjær <olav at olav.dk> wrote:
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> There are three types of conformance criteria:
> (1) Criteria that can be expressed in a DTD
> (2) Criteria that cannot be expressed by a DTD, but can still be checked
> by a machine.
> (3) Criteria that can only be checked by a human.
> 
> A conformance checker must check (1) and (2). A simple validator which
> only checks (1) is therefore not conformant.

One of the motivations of the WHAT-WG stuff, is that existing users
don't have to change their existing tools, processes and
understanding, now all of sudden we're removing one of the most
valuable QA tools available today, based on some spurious notion that
all these existing users don't understand the QA tools limitations.

Firstly I think the conclusions that the audience for WHAT-WG stuff
doesn't understand the limitations of the validator is sustainable -
where's the evidence?

And secondly, there won't be any QA tools at all if the validator
isn't one of them, so we'll be getting even more crap published, and
far from cleaning up the correctness, we'll just have a whole new load
of crud to rubber stamp as valid in WF2, now I realise it's to the
advantage of existing browser manufacturers to rubber stamp
complicated heuristic behaviour they've already solved into a spec (it
prevents new entrants from coming along)  but how is it to the
advantage to the rest of us - understanding specifications becomes
harder and harder and relies on the fact that we knew what happened
before...

I simply cannot see the point in removing one of the few QA tools that
actually exists for HTML, and would like to hear the actual argument
for doing so. (as this is a seperate issue to if application of SGML
is something that it would be)

Jim.