[tei-council] whither HTML of Guidelines and @lang

[Martin Holmes]

Hi there,

On 12-11-23 03:15 AM, Gabriel Bodard wrote:

> Why do we need to validate the HTML output of the Guidelines? HTML5
> doesn't even need to be well-formed XML (although it can be, and I like
> it to be). As Sebastian was arguing earlier in the TEI-L thread on
> @lang, the HTML is just a delivery medium, not something we need to
> process or expect anyone else to re-use, right?

I think this is a very dangerous point of view. If your XHTML doesn't 
validate, then browsers go into quirks mode, where they behave 
differently from each other. Anyone who remembers dealing with the 
miseries of different behaviour from different browsers should never 
want to go anywhere near it again. Validate, I say. Always.

We've got by without @(xml:)lang for years, so implementing it for the 
Guidelines specifically is not a high priority. I think it should be a 
long-term goal to move towards XHTML5 (for which the W3C seems to have a 
good functioning validator, so it's possible), but we should move slowly 
and carefully.

> If we produce HTML5 to the best of our ability, and don't get it all
> right first time, what breaks?

Personally, I use the Jenkins builds of the Glines in preference to the 
official release, so if they're broken for extended periods of time it's 
annoying. It's also hard to implement changes to the Glines in response 
to tickets when you can't see good working builds.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
mholmes at uvic.ca
UVic Humanities Computing and Media Centre