Re: ISSUE-54: doctype-legacy-compat

Henri Sivonen 2009-01-25 13.53:
> On Jan 25, 2009, at 11:51, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> The point of suggesting "about" as the string before the colon was 
>>> that due to pre-existing special use in browsers, it won't be 
>>> feasible for anyone to register "about" as a URI scheme for another 
>>> purpose.
>>> The 'tag' URI scheme is less suitable, because 'tag' URIs by their 
>>> nature include non-mnemonic strings which make them harder to memorize.
>>
>> I don't see why that is a problem. The *only* reason why we're 
>> introducing this doctype variant is to get rid of validator warnings. 
>> So I would expect those who use it to properly type it, otherwise 
>> they'll notice.
> 
> It's pointless to make people to type something that's hard to remember 
> if we can choose something memorizable. [...]

To both make an easy to remember *and* (by Ian's definition) 
unattractive URI, is a challenge ... If one had chosen 
"about:pointless", then no doubt many would have chosen it, in 
order to make a point ... Hence the string should be somewhat 
neutral, so that no one would want to make any points with it ... 
Or, if they were to make a point, then the point would at least 
have a point ...

So, to continue an earlier idea of mine [1], how about

   <!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "about:dtd-compat">

Such a DTD would be easy to explain - e.g in Wikipedia, which 
allready has an article about DOCTYPES, including the "DTD-less" 
HTML 5 doctype [2]. The new doctype of HTML 5 is one of the most 
striking things about it - many will notice it. And it is easy to 
explain that some old tools expect old doctype syntax, and that, 
for them, the HTML 5 specification has this SYSTEM variant of the 
DOCTYPE, with an about:URI in order to formally fulfill the 
DOCTYPE syntax.

[1] http://www.w3.org/mid/4970CF6D.5000302@malform.no
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctype
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 26 January 2009 05:04:04 UTC