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

[Lachlan Hunt]

Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
> 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/
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