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

[Gabriel Bodard]

On 2012-11-23 13:31, Martin Holmes 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.

I don't disagree with any of this. I should stress that I was asking, 
"Do *we* really need [for technical reasons] validation as part of our 
output process?" rather than suggesting that we should not produce valid 
HTML.

My understanding was the XHTML is kind of a dead-end anyway, as far as 
HTML5 is concerned. HTML5 doesn't have to be XML at all, does it? If we 
decided to use HTML5 (and I also agree that there's no rush to do so; 
only the so far speculative request that we output @lang in HTML having 
brought this up at all) then our HTML output doesn't have to be XHTML or 
run through a validator--although it should be as good and standard as 
possible, of course.

But we also need to produce XHTML output for the Epub conversion, right? 
Does that mean we don't want to use HTML5 at all? (At least until 
there's more normalization between the two?)

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
Researcher in Digital Epigraphy

Digital Humanities
King's College London
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London WC2B 5RL

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