[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, fantasai wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > 
> > I am very hostile towards the idea of requiring UAs to implement any 
> > XML parsing features that are in the realm of the XML 1.0 spec but 
> > that the XML 1.0 spec does not require. This means processing the DTD 
> > beyond checking the internal subset for well-formedness.
> 
> That hostility may be justified as far as browser-type UAs go, but I 
> would rather you didn't apply it to server-side and authoring tools.

I don't really understand why there would be a difference here.


> > Those who want to use entities for input, should parse and reserialize 
> > as UTF-8 in their own lair and not expose their entity references (or 
> > parochial legacy encodings) to the public network.
> 
> For those of us writing HTML by hand, this is not a practical solution, 
> particularly when invisible characters are involved. Invisible 
> characters aside, I don't want to go digging through a Unicode character 
> map every time I want → or τ.

Most characters aren't in entities.


> > Why bother with DTDs now that Relax NG exists?
> 
> I agree that syntax-checking for XHTML5 documents should be implemented 
> with RelaxNG rather than DTDs. However, iirc, RelaxNG can't be used on 
> regular HTML. One could create a toolchain that converts HTML to XHTML 
> and then runs it through RelaxNG, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 
> converter needed a DTD for the SGML->XML conversion to work...

Well, the way things are defined, you stick an HTML5 parser on the front, 
and get a DOM that is indistinguishable from an XHTML5 document's, and you 
pass that DOM to the RelaxNG engine (possibly reserialising it first).

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