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

[Olav Junker Kjær]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> I am very reluctant to put a particular DTD in the DOCTYPE, though. Given 
> that DTDs are highly inadequate for catching errors, it feels very wrong 
> to me to be giving a particulr DTD any kind of legitimacy at that level.

A DTD or schema in the spec would be redundant anyway, since it would 
only echo what is described in prose.

DTD validation would be almost useless in the case of WF2, except 
perhaps for catching spelling errors in attribute names. A schema in a 
sufficiently expressive language would go along way, though.

There are lots of interdependencies between attributes in WF2, e.g. the 
value of the type attribute on a input element defines which other 
attributes may apply and what their syntax and semantics are. I'm not 
sure what schema languages support this, since they are usually based on 
the premise that the element name defines what attributes applies.

I notice that <input type="text" src="some url" checked="true"> is valid 
according to the schema for XHTML.

> This doesn't stop conformance checker implements from writing DTDs of 
> their own and then placing them in their SGML catalog so that the HTML5 
> DOCTYPE triggers that DTD, though. The point is that different conformance 
> checker vendors should be able to write their own DTD for HTML5 to 
> complement the rest of the conformance checking process. As the mix 
> between DTD-based and other checking will probably be vendor-dependent, I 
> don't see why we'd want to elevate any particular DTD to official status.

Actually I think it would be beneficial for interoperability and perhaps 
discovery of weaknesses in the spec, if several schemas were developed 
by independent parties during the call for implementation.

regards
Olav Junker Kjær