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

Fri Nov 23 11:36:34 EST 2012

Hi there,

On 12-11-23 06:49 AM, Gabriel Bodard wrote:

> 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?)

I think we should aim for the kind of polyglot document described here:

<http://blog.whatwg.org/xhtml5-in-a-nutshell>

In other words, valid HTML5 which is also XHTML5, and will function 
correctly whether served as html or xml. I also think it's quite a 
realistic possibility that we might make virtually the entire document 
XHTML 1.1 compliant as well; I've had a number of documents which were 
XHTML 1.1, but which validated as XHTML5 with one or two tiny changes 
(such as the doctype <!DOCTYPE html>).

Of course, that means that we fail to take advantage of the cool new 
HTML5 features such as Custom Data Attributes, which give us the 
enticing promise of round-tripping between TEI and (X)HTML5.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)