[whatwg] text/html conformance checkers and doctype

Thu Jul 28 16:19:43 PDT 2005

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > >
> > > The advantage of allowing case-insensitivity and white space 
> > > variance is that it would be more uniform with HTML4 doctypes. That 
> > > is, it would be easier to write software that deals with both.
> > 
> > You seem to be mixing authoring requirements and implementation 
> > requirements.
> 
> No. I am interested in requirements for conformance checker 
> implementations and, therefore, authoring.

Ah. I hadn't considered people wanting to write one conformance checker to 
check HTML4 and HTML5. I would imagine the DOCTYPE would be the least of 
your problems if you did. :-)

> I am strictly considering the requirements for conformance checkers.
> 
> When something is
>   allowed by browsers
> AND
>   not likely to be an oversight on behalf of the author (eg. missing
>   semicolon after an entity reference is likely to be an oversight)
> AND
>   compatible with HTML4
> why not allow it in conforming documents?

Well, we could just drop the DOCTYPE altogether, really (except that would 
trigger quirks mode).

I agree that it would make sense to allow spaces there. I'll sort that out 
in WA1. In WF2 there is no conformance checker product class so no need to 
put anything there, IMHO.

> Eg. an author could reasonable expect to be able to use one or more 
> whitespace charecters instead of one space between "DOCTYPE" and "html", 
> because that's how it has been before and still is between attributes (I 
> hope). Why forbid it?

Why forbid:

   <!doctype html "foo" "bar">

...? :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'