[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> If one has a single non-presentational relationship that one wishes to 
> associate with a web page AND one has control over the HTTP headers that 
> are sent with said web page (e.g., because your blogging software is 
> written in PHP), then an HTTP header is a viable option.
> 
> If, however, one wants to associate a small set of triples (subject-uri, 
> relationship, predicate-uri) OR the only means that you have available 
> for publishing your web site is FTP, then embedding such 
> non-presentational data inside the web page itself becomes desirable.

Pingback supports in-page markup, though (rel=pingback). That could easily 
be extended to work on a per-<article> basis rather than per-page. You 
certainly don't have to go to RDF to do what Trackback does, HTML already 
has features to do it more easily (and more accessibly). That's all I'm 
trying to say here.


> There may be another force in play here too.  There will be a desire 
> that one can serialize all DOMs in a way that can round trip.  The 
> discussion about putting tables inside of paragraphs puzzles me because 
> I can't imagine why anybody would want to do that, or even what it would 
> mean; but there may be valid use cases where serializing a valid DOM and 
> parsing it using HTML5 rules produces a different DOM.  If so, that 
> would be sub-optimal.

Fair point. Maybe we should disallow paragraphs from holding structured 
inline content after all.


> Past attempts to address this (XHTML1.x then XHTML2) clearly didn't 
> strike the right balance between backwards compatibility and architected 
> extensibility. That doesn't mean that it isn't possible, it just means 
> that it wasn't a goal of those teams, and therefore wasn't attempted.

Yeah. I think we're trying pretty hard with HTML5, but it's not clear to 
me exactly what the solution should be (or, really, what exactly the 
problem is).

Food for thought, though.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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