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

Thu Apr 7 04:03:01 PDT 2005

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Jim Ley wrote:
> > 
> > In my world that is solved by no longer claiming that HTML is an SGML 
> > application.
> 
> So please state that clearly in the specification.

Yes, patience boy. All in due course. Like I said earlier in this thread, 
I haven't gotten that far in the editing yet, which is why I don't have 
detailed well-thought-through answers to all these questions.

When I get around to actually speccing out how this part of things work 
(probably around the same time I work on a section about how to parse the 
non-XML serialisation), I'll take a close look at all the e-mails in this 
thread and reply to them all.

> Can you also explain the point of the <!DOCTYPE ...  gibberish that the 
> specs require at the top of documents?  What are they doing, please 
> remove them, they serve no purpose whatsoever.  Or if they do serve a 
> purpose, document what the purpose is.

They trigger standards mode in modern browsers. The current one for WHATWG 
specs is:

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WHATWG//NONSGML HTML5//EN">

...as described in 1.8 of the WA1 spec and also somewhere in the WF2 spec.

This will hopefully be explained in more detail in the future. At the 
moment I'm concentrating on defining all the elements and attributes of 
the language.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'