[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

Thu Dec 7 20:18:24 PST 2006

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:11:09 +0600, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

> I was initially disappointed that <!DOCTYPE html> is well-formed
> because I though that it'd allow to differentiate HTML from XHTML
> documents unambiguously (since XHTML documents couldn't have it).
> That said, now I think it's probably irrelevant.
>
> The two format are not the same, but many people have been trying to
> find common ground since XHTML has been invented for various reasons.
> The result is a lot of HTML documents which are wrongly identified as
> XHTML (because they're not even well-formed XML). So I think dropping
> the HTML/XHTML identification string altogether is the right thing to
> do; it's meaningless anyway because a lot of authors are careless.
> Let's use the media type instead, the real thing browsers use to
> differentiate the two, and force people to make things well formed if
> they want it called XHTML by the validator.

The DOCTYPE is only needed to trigger standards mode in browsers. That's why it has been stripped down so much that it's no more informative as a proper SGML DOCTYPE.

> The only features of HTML I see that are not supported by the subset
> are <base> vs. xml:base, and that you can't specify encoding within
> the file because one use <?xml encoding=""?> and the other use <meta
> http-equiv="">, but the encoding can still be set as a media type
> parameter).

With application/xml, it cannot (and for good!).

> That doesn't leave much of HTML that can't be expressed by the
> subset. Am I missing something? Which useful features aren't part of
> the subset?

<noscript>
document.write()

-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com