[whatwg] text/html conformance checkers and doctype

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Jul 28, 2005, at 20:31, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > If so, I would answer "no". But I don't have a strong opinion. 
> > > > What's the advantage either way?
> > > 
> > > The advantage of allowing case-insensitivity and white space 
> > > variance is that it would be more uniform with HTML4 doctypes. That 
> > > is, it would be easier to write software that deals with both.
> > 
> > You seem to be mixing authoring requirements and implementation 
> > requirements.
> 
> No. I am interested in requirements for conformance checker 
> implementations and, therefore, authoring.

In HTML5 they are separately defined (though hopefully equivalent). That 
is, there is one section for describing what the syntax is, and one 
section for how a conformance checker should parse a document to find the 
syntax errors.

In any case, the way it's ended up so far, the DOCTYPE construct is case 
insensitive.


> > Well again it depends if you are asking about authoring or 
> > implementation requirements. For implementations there are no 
> > requirements here.
> 
> I am strictly considering the requirements for conformance checkers.
> 
> When something is
>   allowed by browsers
> AND
>   not likely to be an oversight on behalf of the author (eg. missing
>   semicolon after an entity reference is likely to be an oversight)
> AND
>   compatible with HTML4
> why not allow it in conforming documents?

Indeed. I'm just saying that at the moment in WF2 there are no parsing 
requirements. In WA1 I agree with you.


> Eg. an author could reasonable expect to be able to use one or more 
> whitespace charecters instead of one space between "DOCTYPE" and "html", 
> because that's how it has been before and still is between attributes (I 
> hope). Why forbid it?

Indeed. It's allowed now.

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