On 07/07/2009, at 7:37 AM, Remember the dot wrote:
Okay, first thoughts:
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com>
wrote:
It's clear at this point that HTML 5 will be
the next version of
HTML.
It was obvious for a long time that XHTML was going nowhere, but now
it's official: the XHTML working group has been disbanded and work on
all non-HTML 5 variants of HTML has ceased. (Source:
<http://www.w3.org/2009/06/xhtml-faq.html>)
That page clearly says that there will be an XHTML 5. XHTML is not
going
away.
* We can use HTML 5 form attributes. These will enhance the
experience of users of appropriate browsers, and
do nothing for
others. At least Opera 9.6x already supports almost all HTML 5 form
attributes. (Source:
<http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto211/forms/>) We could, for
instance, give required fields the "required" attribute, which will
cause the browser to prevent the form submission and notify the user
if they aren't filled in, without needing either JavaScript or a
server-side check.
What's to prevent a malicious user from manually posting an invalid
submission? If there are no server-side checks, will the servers
crash?
... Or from using a browser that doesn't support them. We're obviously
not going to be removing server-side checks in favour of client-side
checks, that's stupid. We're adding client-side checks to enhance
usability.
2) Once this
goes live, if no problems arise, try causing an XML
well-formedness error. For instance, remove the quote marks around
one attribute of an element that's included in every page. I suggest
this as a separate step because I suspect there are some bot
operators
who are doing screen-scraping using XML libraries, so it would be a
good idea to assess how feasible it is at the present time to stop
being well-formed. In the long run, of course, those bot operators
should switch to using the API. If we receive enough complaints once
this goes live, we can revert it and continue to ship HTML 5 that's
also well-formed XML, for the time being.
Why be cruel to our bot operators? XHTML is simpler and more
consistent than
tag soup HTML, and it's a lot easier to find a good XML parser than
a good
HTML parser.
They should be using the API.
So, while I see some benefit to switching to HTML 5,
I'd prefer to
use XHTML
5 instead.
You've given one benefit of XHTML5, which is negated by the fact that
we provide the API for a consistent machine-readable interface, and
the benefits to HTML5 that Aryeh has outlined. What other advantages
are there?
--
Andrew Garrett
Contract Developer, Wikimedia Foundation
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us