[whatwg] XSLT and DOCTYPES

Thu Dec 18 11:34:51 PST 2008

Elliotte Harold wrote:
> ...
> Since XSLT 1.0 can generate well-formed XHTML without any problems, 
> there really is no need for this at all. Documents generated by XSLT 
> that need to be conforming should simply be XHTML.
> ...

Now if you can persuade Microsoft to implement XHTML, that might fly.

> Furthermore, it is false that XSLT cannot generate an HTML 5 conforming 
> DOCTYPE in HTML mode. As proof I present this stylesheet:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
>   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
> 
>   <xsl:output indent="yes" method="html"/>
> 
>   <xsl:template match="/">
>     <xsl:text disable-output-escaping='yes'><!DOCTYPE HTML></xsl:text>
>      <html>
>      </html>
>   </xsl:template>
> 
> </xsl:stylesheet>
> 
> 
> and the following output:
> 
> $ xsltproc test.xsl http://www.cafeconleche.org/
> <!DOCTYPE HTML><html></html>

Doesn't work with Firefox' builtin XSLT engine which ignores d-o-e (and 
is allowed to do so).

> ...
> Most importantly, does it really make sense to add ever more cruft not 
> the spec to support every legacy tool and language out there? What if we 
> discover that K&R C won't do Unicode? or that some old versions of Java 
> require tags to be upper cased? A spec like this should not be making 
> special allowances for the languages that may be used to generate it.
> 
> This time I will request a specific action: delete this section 
> completely. It has no place in the spec.
> ...

I totally disagree.

The spec also fails to mention that there are more use cases than XSLT; 
several HTML serialization methods share this restriction with XSLT's 
HTML output mode. Thus, the spec should continue to allow this, but pick 
a more correct name.

BR, Julian