[whatwg] text/html conformance checkers and doctype

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> I would like to add HTML (both 4 and 5) support to
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/validator/ .

Great!


> Assuming that the supported syntax for HTML4 is constrained to exclude 
> minimizations that don't work in browsers, the biggest issue with 
> decoupling the parser from the HTML version seems to be the doctype.

Makes sense. I would recommend treating the following syntax, 
case-insensitive, as being conformant:

   doctype ::= "<!" "doctype" whitespace+ "html" whitespace* ">"

But I haven't thought much about this yet. The way parsing is to be 
defined I expect to just say "parsers should do this, and if they hit this 
they should do this, and if they hit this it's an error and they should do 
this", with confomance checkers having to do the same but reporting the 
errors. If that makes sense.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'