[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Tue Dec 5 16:06:45 PST 2006


On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Michel Fortin wrote:
> > 
> > The "one target" now is HTML5.
> 
> I wonder about one thing though. If the recommended serialization is 
> HTML5, why is there new features which are simply not supported by HTML5 
> (list inside paragraphs, nested forms, etc.)? My impression is that 
> while HTML is recommended in the prose, the new features are implicitly 
> recommending XHTML.
> 
> Recommending using the HTML format while making XHTML more powerful at 
> the same time just strike me as incoherent. This makes it look like 
> XHTML is the future and that HTML is a temporary and limited 
> recommendation to keep backward compatibility. That's what I understand 
> while reading the spec as a whole. If that's not what is intended, then 
> maybe something should be done about that, like removing some of the 
> incompatible features.

I believe this is only a problem with the <p> element; other 
paragraph-level elements (like <li> and <footer>) don't have this problem. 
I agree that it is unfortunate that the <p> element in the syntax is not 
allowed to contain the same elements it can contain in the DOM. Maybe we 
should indeed remove this, but that would be unfortunate.

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



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