[whatwg] Section 1.7 "abstract language"

Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo at ibiblio.org
Sat Aug 15 06:27:31 PDT 2009


> What term would you recommend rather than "language" that is more
> understandable than "data model" or "information model"?
>
> Would "vocabulary" be ok?

"Vocabulary" may be an an improvement over "abstract language"--I'd
need to think further about that--but I think Kevin's suggestion is
likely better. The spec defines a language (not abstract) with two
syntaxes (or dialects, or variants). E.g.


This specification defines a language for describing documents and
applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory
representations of resources that use this language.

The in-memory representation is known as "DOM5 HTML", or "the DOM" for short.

Various syntaxes can be used to transmit documents written in this
language, two of which are defined in this specification.

The first such syntax is "HTML5". This is the format recommended for
most authors. It is compatible with all legacy Web browsers. If a
document is transmitted with the MIME type text/html, then it will be
processed as an "HTML5" document by Web browsers.

The second syntax defined here uses XML, and is known as "XHTML5"....

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo at ibiblio.org


More information about the whatwg mailing list