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

Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi
Wed Apr 6 14:05:42 PDT 2005


On Apr 6, 2005, at 15:10, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
>> What is the benefit of having HTML defined as an application of SGML ?
>
> So that it may be processed with SGML tools,

Can we focus on real use cases, please? Who would anyone want to use 
SGML tools (except perhaps for feel-good validation pending proper 
conformance checkers) now that tag soup tools and XML tools exist?

> and possibly even generated using XSLT.

An XSLT transformer is an XML tool--not an SGML tool. You can generate 
HTML 4 or What WG HTML using XSLT by writing your transformation to 
produce XHTML, taking SAX output from the transformer and using an HTML 
serializer at the end of the SAX pipeline.

> 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.

At least I am still unconvinced about your "must".

> 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

That's not a problem if you don't claim they are ID attributes but 
attributes that happen to be named id.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/




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