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public-html-comments posting from: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/mid/201108082059.48324.bert@w3.org
[[ A personal comment on http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/ In several places, HTML4 (or rather SGML) automatically ignores white space in the source, so that you can lay out the source more freely. E.g., this document has not a single white space character: <!doctype html public '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN'> <html> <head> <title>Test</title> <body> <table> <tr> <td>one</td> <td>two</td> </table> HTML5, on the other hand, sees lots of spaces and line feeds in this document. People will want to lay out the document like this anyway, and the result is that the white space has to be removed at some other stage in the processing. In anticipation of HTML5, CSS already added some rules to ignore spaces that are likely to be not significant, but as CSS has no access to the mark-up, those rules are necessarily wrong in some cases. (E.g., CSS will now ignore certain spaces even if they had been marked-up as character entities: clearly not the author's intention.) If the document is processed by some other system than CSS, that system, too, will need to deal with white space that may not have been significant. It would be better if HTML5 remained backwards compatible with HTML4 in this case, ignoring non-significant white space in all places where HTML4 ignores it, too. ]]
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: <http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html>. Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: HTML4 was not compatible with implementations. HTML5 is. And CSS aligns with implementations too. There is no problem here as far as I can tell.