RE: ISSUE-4 (html-versioning) (vs. ISSUE-30 longdesc)

There was another use case that pushed me toward continuing
with DOCTYPE, which is the extensive use of DOCTYPE in XML/XHTML
editors.

http://manual.altova.com/XMLSpy/spyprofessional/index.html?xshtmlcssjson_html.htm
http://www.oxygenxml.com/xhtml_editor.html
http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.wst.webtools.doc.user/topics/tjprefs.html
http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/xhtml/xhtml_dtds.html

and a few more. Since there is substantial deployed
infrastructure that knows about DOCTYPE-based
editing and conformance validation, why add something
that doesn't match reality?

The problem with the root element version parameter is
that it can't as easily be used by a generic editor.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net



-----Original Message-----
From: Toby Inkster [mailto:tai@g5n.co.uk] 
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 5:02 PM
To: Larry Masinter
Cc: 'Maciej Stachowiak'; 'Adam Barth'; 'HTML WG'
Subject: RE: ISSUE-4 (html-versioning) (vs. ISSUE-30 longdesc)

On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 11:38 -0800, Larry Masinter wrote:
> If someone wants to write a different change proposal which
> introduces a HTML version parameter somewhere else, I would
> likely be willing to support that as well. 

For what it's worth, the following HTML and XHTML Recs/RFCs all include
an attribute called 'version' on the root element which may be used to
indicate HTML version:

 HTML 2.0
 HTML 3.2
 HTML 4.01 (Transitional DTD **)
 XHTML 1.1
 XHTML+RDFa 1.0

** = yes, HTML 4.01 deprecates it, so you might think it's justifiable
for HTML5 to remove it altogether, but you've got to look at the reason
that HTML 4.01 deprecates it: "it is redundant with version information
provided by the document type declaration". If version information is no
longer provided by the DTD in HTML5, then it is no longer redundant.

Similar facilities are available in some/all(?) versions of SVG, in RSS
2, in XSLT, in OPML and probably other common XML formats that I'm
forgetting.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Monday, 1 March 2010 01:44:05 UTC