[whatwg] Authoring tools (was Graceful Degradation and MimeTypes)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 4 déc. 2006 à 6:14, Mike Schinkel a écrit :

> It does matter. It is not just one of the important things, it is THE
> important thing.  Having two divergent HTMLs will create problems  
> for a vast
> number of people and will significantly reduce efficiencies for  
> anyone that
> has to deal with it. Worse, it could cause the non-technical public to
> decide that HTML its just too much trouble, and THAT would be a  
> tragedy.

I would tend to think that people would say well-formed XHTML is too  
much trouble, not HTML or pseudo-XHTML served with text/html. But  
that's not really better.

> The irony is I'm not proposing much; just have as a design axiom  
> that the
> trajectory of HTML5 and XHTML should aimed toward convergence when
> technically possible.

I don't like the word "convergence" as you use it: because we cannot  
change how HTML or XML is parsed there cannot be any real  
convergence. All we can do is decide what is valid and what is not  
within HTML, and to some extend within XHTML, and thus decide what is  
valid and what is not within the common subset at the intersection of  
the two. I don't see the use of the common subset as convergence, but  
as a way to avoid reimplementing the wheel to have two different  
outputs where it would be not necessary to do so.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/