TAG will form Task Force
T V Raman (Google) has asked us to form a task force for
a well-known issue: the divergence of the HTML and XML stacks.
Goal: Support the community using XML tool chains
to generate and possibly re-use web content.
This has a long history - philosophical differences
Divergence dimensions
- Syntax - Tag soup - mis-nested tags
- Pressure from Validator. browsers? search engines? authoring tools? servers?
- Different DOM created
- No namespaces in HTML - No prefixes on element names (even for svg)
- Default namespaces from MIME type?
- Syntax - unquoted attributes
- Distributed Extensibility in general
Polyglot
The intersection of HTML5 and XML languages which can
be parsed appropriately as either.
Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/ Ed. Eliot Graff, MSFT
Polyglot
- Constraints on syntax used
- Use of specific namespace prefixes
- Specific upper/lower case of tags
- In practice, choices (DOM constraints or no scripts)
- ...
Distributed Extensibility
- SVG - In-W3C, in HTML WG
- RDFa - In W3C, not HTML WG
- FBML - Not in W3C.
Scope/Timescale
- Raman: "Fix XML Namepaces to bring about a convergence" - "next 12 months"
- Not short term affecting May 2011 HTML5 LC
- Maximize the ability of people using XML tools to produce and read web sites
- Plot possible future path minimizing divergence
Important.
Links
TAG Issue 67: XML-HTML divergence
TAG Issue 54: Tag Soup Integration
2010-05-03 Raman's mail to the AC
Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents
