[whatwg] text/html conformance checkers and doctype

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jul 28, 2005, at 20:31, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>>
>>> If so, I would answer "no". But I don't have a strong opinion. What's
>>> the advantage either way?
>>
>> 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.

>>> (I'd rather address this in WA1 than WF2, anyway.)
>>
>> I understand, but WF2 is an extension to HTML4, so it is reasonable to
>> expect that white space and case insensitivity is allowed where it is
>> allowed in HTML4.
>
> Well again it depends if you are asking about authoring or 
> implementation
> requirements. For implementations there are no requirements here.

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?

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?

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