[whatwg] Thoughts on HTML 5

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 17 Dec 2008, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> 
> I thought later on this topic and i arrived to conclusion that we cannot 
> forbid or delete completely the HTML serialization, but there are no 
> real use cases for this in server generated web pages. Even in case of 
> user-generated content an application must parse it server-side prior to 
> publish, and in the worst case may use the spec's algorithm to build a 
> standard-compliant DOM tree, then serialize it producing valid XML code 
> (therefore an application can always provid valid XHTML) In my opinion, 
> we should allow content to be sent as text/html, but HTML serialization 
> and associated technologies (DOMDocument.write or DOMElement.outerHTML) 
> should be marked deprecate, since there are stricter and more performant 
> way to do same thing.

XML is neither more performant nor stricter than XML. The main differences 
are that XML has less user-friendly error recovery and supports arbitrary 
namespaces. Authors have clearly indicated that this is not compelling. 
Deprecating HTML thus seems like vain effort. (We already tried over the 
past few years with XHTML 1.x, and it didn't work.)

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